Opening Evening: How Far It Has Traveled to Reach This Light – Photography Exhibition

Join us for opening night time of “How Far It Has Traveled to Reach This Light”, by photographer Christine Lorenz, that includes our salt made right here within the Kanawha Valley.

Free occasion! No tickets wanted. Cash/credit score bar accessible. Complimentary charcuterie accessible.

Artist Statement: I exploit the instruments of macro images to look at the merchandise of extraction, creating areas for reflection on the methods we discover that means in supplies. I’m significantly all in favour of salt, as a result of nothing is extra acquainted: to be human is to acknowledge it. It’s an equalizer. And as a mineral of the earth, it has a compelling approach of behaving over time. It’s a form shifter, shifting into and out of visibility, dispersing and reorganizing by itself.

Salt is a catalyst in numerous elements of human connection. It’s irresistible to start out digging into the place it comes from, and the place it goes. This undertaking is constructed on crystals cultivated from the saline springs of the Kanawha Valley. The springs draw from underground strata that predate Pangea. The salt is extracted and distributed by descendants of an business that thrived within the area within the early nineteenth century. In this exhibition, the pictures of those crystals catch the sunshine within the place the place the fabric was drawn to the floor.

This is a spot with a wealthy and complicated historical past, entwined with the earth and the fallout of what we’ve carried out with it. To reside in Appalachia is to be at residence with parts that mixture over millennia—which might be drawn up by means of the load that accumulates above, that attain the sunshine and disperse, that self-organize into tough derivatives of platonic varieties, nonetheless briefly. To be human is to be part of the life cycle of those minerals every single day.

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Christine Lorenz makes use of images to discover the methods we discover that means in supplies. Her pictures have been proven at Photographic Exploration Project in Berlin, photo-eye gallery in Santa Fe, Erie Art Museum, and Brooklyn Waterfront Arts Coalition. Her work has been featured by Refract Journal, Der Greif, Lenscratch, and Fraction Magazine. She was a 2025 artist in residence at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. Lorenz earned her MFA on the University of California, Santa Barbara, and BA at The Ohio State University. She publishes small-edition photobooks and has produced three collaborative artwork and textual content tasks with Arts Letters and Numbers, New York. She was a founding member of Flock Artist Collective, which elevates the intertwined murals and parenting. She teaches at Duquesne University and Point Park University.

Additional images from the Kanawha Salines collection can be on view at Silver Eye Center for Photography as a part of Radial Survey 4 from November 6 to February 7.