Arteles Catalogue 2023-2020

Non thematic program / JULY 2021
Will Connally
USA
www.willconnally.com
About
Will Connally is a photo-based artist whose practice
encompasses fiction writing, set design, performance, and
installation. In addition to drawing inspiration from personal
narratives, his original work is influenced by literary sources,
film noir, and amateur theater productions.
Connally received his MFA in Photography from Cranbrook
Academy of Art and his BFA from Virginia Commonwealth
University. He was a resident at Banff Centre for the Arts in
Alberta, Canada, and was awarded a Professional Fellowship
from The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. He has presented
his work in exhibitions and artist lectures internationally,
has artwork in the permanent collection of Cranbrook Art
Museum.
Lake Elster Series
I spent the residency at Arteles reading, drawing, painting,
and searching for locations for my photographic series.
I read the folklore of Finland in comparison to Abenaki
Native American legends, delved into ghost stories, and
also researched memory loss. My afternoons were spent
surveying the local environs by foot, bicycle, and car, with
a few general locations already in mind. I was alone for twothirds
of my time there, due to the pandemic, which took
some adjustment. It was an otherworldly experience, having
so much time to myself in a foreign location.
My aim was to find new visual terrain for my photographic
scenes, which are set in the northeastern United States,
specifically in New Hampshire, but have been photographed
across the U.S. and Canada. I scouted the lakes and forests
of Finland to find locations that could resemble my mental
image of Lake Elster, the primary location in the series. The
Nordic woods offered a new sense of scale and otherness
to the series, along with the extended summer evening light,
and I found myself reshooting/ restaging the same scene
in various locations. The photographs embrace the elusive,
ever-changing quality of fiction, especially when retold by a
narrator in his nineties.