Gallery With A Cause • Located in the New Mexico Cancer Center • Benefitting the NMCC Foundation
Please call gallery director Regina Held to arrange a private gallery tour, make a purchase, or ask any questions.
I was born in the fifties and from an early age, I have had a camera in my hands and would eagerly wait for my black and white brownie box camera prints to arrive by mail. I attended Rochester Institute of Technology as a Fine Art Major with a photography minor. There I learned to compose the finished image in the camera’s view finder since there were no editing tools prior to printing the film. When there was no more money to attend college, I went to New York city and continued my education as a model in the fashion world with the professional photographers I worked with. I had hoped to return to college yet ended up with a 16-year career with covers, editorial fashion spreads, top designers’ runway, and television. After a white-water rafting trip through the Grand Canyon and a mystical experience there, I returned and proceeded to take a river guide course. I spent the next 5 summers guiding on the Colorado river in the Grand Canyon and modeling in the fall and winter. The mystical experience introduced me to Indigenous wisdom, and I started studies that have spanned up to recent years, which also include Holistic practices.
Nowadays, digital photography provides a large variety of tools to alter or enhance an image. I rarely utilize those; I usually print my images as I captured them. I love it when all the elements combine and transcend normal reality. I had never really understood abstract art. Yet as my sensibilities progressed my images often turn out semi-abstract. Hence, the name of my business: Pho~Real Imaginings. My favorite compliment about my photographs is that they look like paintings.
I was introduced to the medium of collage by what was called a treasure map in the seventies by a Wolf Clan elder from Vermont. Since then, I have learned of similar processes such as vision boards or soul collages. Whatever the term is, they are a manifestation tool to take what is in the head and heart, find images that represent them and paste on a board to materialize that vision. When I first started, I did one annually for a New Years proposal of what I hoped to manifest. People wanted to buy them, but they were too personal. My friends suggested that I make ones that I would be willing to sell and have been creating collages since the nineties.
