October 5th - November 16th 2024
Gallery Hours: 24/7
miniMAC (miniature Mount Airy Contemporary)
25 West Mt. Airy Avenue, Philadelphia PA 19119
www.mountairycontemporary.com
miniMAC is pleased to announce The Edges, an exhibition of works by Leah Frances and Stefan Abrams. Both artists have spent time photographing towns and neighborhoods affected by deindustrialization and depopulation, aware that the lens through which they see these places is often a reflection of themselves and what they bring to the camera.
For the series Seafever, during a residency in the sparsely populated village of Pouch Cove, Newfoundland, Leah Frances photographed people and places she encountered on long walks to mark time and stave off loneliness from isolation. “In Newfoundland,” she says, “I looked for some kind of correlation to where I live now, in the Rust Belt of America. Many of the towns around mine have lost what was critical to their economy: coal, steel, manufacturing. Here it was the cod fishery, shut down approximately 30 years before my arrival. In a town up the coast from Pouch Cove, I photographed a mantelpiece decorated with baubles from Christmas 1991. In the spring of 1992, the federal government banned cod fishing, creating the biggest layoff in Canadian history. People left. I was wondering if there would be the anger in Newfoundland that simmers close to the surface in my adopted home. I didn’t run into it. Not this time, anyway. I encountered a resigned and steadfast way of living: Walking, gardening, hunting, preserving, and preparing for the long winter. Weaving the fabric of existence. To quote photographer Robert Frank: ‘Good Days Quiet.’”
Stefan Abrams’ photography in this exhibition, from his series Borderlines, was shot over a number of years in the Kensington section of Philadelphia. Once a bustling industrial center of the city, Kensington experienced depopulation and increased poverty rates from subsequent deindustrialization, and in many senses its residents live at the periphery of political and economic power in the city. Abrams photographs people and places in this neighborhood, and says his camera “frequently acts as a borderline between me and these spaces. The photographs themselves act as a borderline between the viewer and what is pictured. Art is a mark, sometimes it is a line, sometimes it is a borderline.”
Leah Frances is a Canadian photographer born in Alert Bay, Canada, now based in Easton, Pennsylvania. Frances’ work has been featured in numerous print and online platforms including The Guardian, The Washington Post , The New York Times Magazine, Buzzfeed and more and has been exhibited nationally and internationally. In December 2021 she graduated with an MFA in photography from The Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University in Philadelphia.
Her first sold out photo book, “American Squares,” debuted in September 2019 at the New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1 and was quickly featured by T, The New York Times Style Magazine, in their “T Suggests: Things our Editors Like” column. Her second book of photography, “Lunch Poems,” was released in October 2022 (now sold out). Esquire named it a “Favorite Photo Book of Fall 2022” and it was the subject of a PBS “Short Takes” Documentary, Leah Frances — Lunch Poems.
An exclusive collection of Leah’s “American Squares” prints is now represented by The MF Gallery in Detroit, Michigan..
More about Frances’ work can be found at https://leah-frances.com.
Stefan Abrams is a Philadelphia based photographer. He was born in South Africa but raised in the United States. He holds a BA from the University of Vermont and an MFA from Tyler School of Art..
More about Abram’s work can be found at https://stefanabrams.com.
miniMAC is a project of MAC (Mount Airy Contemporary). MAC has been curating shows in northwest Philadelphia since 2009.
