Nov 1st - Nov 30th
Braiding a Current
Dru Donovan
&
Joel W. Fisher
&
Joel W. Fisher
What happens when two artists, collaborators, partners, and parents to young children, turn their attention toward the same moment, the same scene, the same bodies, and make pictures? Braiding a Current emerges not as stasis nor a timeline, but as a current; one that doubles back on itself, layers perspectives, and pulls forward small moments that feel irretrievable even as they are made.
For years, we have been working in the background of each other’s practices: assisting, editing, suggesting, titling, and challenging one another. It is new that we are foregrounding that relationship, not only as artistic collaborators but also as partners and now as parents. Braiding a Current is not an archive of family life or a portrait of domesticity but a reckoning with photography’s stopping of time and the simultaneous impossibility of doing so. Our work lives in the tension between desire and failure, the need to hold onto something, and the realization that we can't.
We began to collaborate in this way when we were prompted to visually respond to Roland Barthes' Winter Garden Photograph for Odette England’s Keeper of the Hearth project. Like Barthes, we were trying to conjure pictures, photographs that had deep personal significance and yet, perhaps, little to no meaning for the viewer. In doing so, during our first Mother’s Day with our oldest child, we were both drawn to the same scene. Looking at our child, at each other, looking at a swirl of hair on the top of her head, but compelled by different urgencies. One of us was determined to photograph the cowlick that resembled a galaxy, before her hair grew in and the swirl faded from view. The other, unsure what it meant but still understanding its necessity, pulled back and took two photographs as the other swirled around the swirl.
The work is not a debate, a dichotomy, or a comparison of approaches. It’s a shared inquiry into how to live as artists and parents without losing either and how to let the intimacy of family shape our practices and work without collapsing into sentimentality or spectacle (though both may be present here). We are interested in what doesn't match. In the pictures that don’t adhere to any particular order, chronological or formal, but rather exist to hold onto individual moments shared. Braiding a Current is not just a family album or visual representation of “memory,” but rather aims to reveal what work on family can be: a site of difference, longing, and being.
Braiding a Current asks what it means to collaborate when authorship is blurred, when the personal is not just a subject but a site of labor and love, and when looking becomes both an individual act and a shared gesture. The photographs and videos, some quiet, some chaotic, are about parenting, yes, but they are also about persistence and not outgrowing the creative process, or the need to make sense of what we are part of. They follow presence, sometimes mundane, sometimes significant. We are looking to stay with these moments. To not forget. To hold on, not because it is unique, but because we were there, and we were looking. Apart and together.
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Dru Donovan and Joel W. Fisher
Dru Donovan
Dru Donovan’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including in reGeneration2: Tomorrow’s Photographers Today at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, and the 2010 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art. Her photographs have been shown at Fraenkel Gallery, Yancey Richardson Gallery, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, and the Schneider Museum of Art in Ashland, Oregon. Donovan’s work has been published in Aperture, Blind Spot, Picture Magazine, and Matte magazines. Her first book, Lifting Water, was published by TBW Books in 2011. She has participated in artist residencies with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Program (2011–12) and the Headlands Center for the Arts (2018). Donovan has received grants from the Oregon Arts Commission, the Ford Family Foundation. She received the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship in 2015 and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2016. She holds a BFA from California College of the Arts and an MFA from Yale University and is currently an Assistant Professor of Art with Term at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon.
Joel W. Fisher
Joel W. Fisher’s work spans lens-based practices, both analog and digital, as well as writing, research, and theory. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in solo and group exhibitions, including at the Wassaic Project, Fraenkel Gallery, Slocumb Art Gallery, and AD/HD at KNOWMOREGAMES and P-R-I-M-E-T-I-M-E Galleries in Brooklyn. His first monograph, Landmark (Daylight Books), was nominated for the Aperture Foundation’s First Book Award at Paris Photo. Fisher has participated in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Program. He has received grants supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Oregon Arts Commission, and the Ford Family Foundation. His forthcoming monograph, Framework, will be published by TBW Books in 2027. Fisher holds a BA in English from the University of New Hampshire and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. From 2006 to 2007, he studied at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, Germany, as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar. He is currently an Associate Professor of Art and Studio Head of Photography at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon.
Dru Donovan and Joel W. Fisher are married and live in Portland, Oregon, with their two children. This exhibition marks their first collaboration.