Expanding the Boundaries of Creative Photography

By Magdéleine Ferru

January 20 – March 12, 2023

Valdez, Alaska, February 8, 2023 – The Valdez Museum & Historical Archive is pleased to announce our winter exhibit! The Girl Made of Light and Dust by the acclaimed regional artist Magdéleine Ferru. This exhibit pairs her photographs with her hand-made experimental artists’ books. Here she explores concepts like human nature, identity, passing time, and death. This is a unique artist exhibit that is bound to make the viewer think.

She expands these concepts with creative photographic mediums. Some of these mediums included are cyanotype, polaroid film, and polaroid negatives. Cyanotype photographs are produced with a chemical process that treats a surface that reacts to UV light. It’s a creative and time-consuming practice that results in beautiful images. This exhibit is filled with unique photographic processes that make an elegant solo exhibition.

This exhibit is divided into 6 spaces: Pukmina Passeuse d’Âmes, Forest, “The Lady of the Lake”, Evanescence, Kennecott, and Meandres.

Each space contains a themed wall with an associated artist book paired with it. Her artist’s books incorporate wood, glass, water, and light to give three-dimensionality that invite the viewer to, as Ferru explains, “dream and wander into another reality of your choosing.”

“[In my art] the imprecise and the blurry come to the fore, changing the relationship to space and time. Finding inspiration in the natural world surrounding me, I capture a sudden fleeting, vanished emotion.” – Ferru

This one of a kind exhibit is on display now at the Valdez Museum & Historical Archive. Our winter hours are Tuesday – Saturday 12 – 5pm. Selected Ferru prints and artist’s books are for sale in the Museum Store.

Special thank you to the supporters of this exhibition: Alaska State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment of the Arts, and the CVEA Community Foundation.

For More Information Contact: Executive Director Patricia Relay Tel. 907-835-2764, Email: prelay@valdezmuseum.org