Poignant Pics no. 26 // Diana Nicholette Jeon on selections from Dawn Surratt’s “The Silent Year”
Welcome to no. 26 in our series Poignant Pics, where we've asked photo curators, educators, collectors, and makers to share a brief essay on a photo that has significantly changed the way they think or look at the world.
In this issue, our editor Diana Nicholette Jeon writes about Dawn Surratt’s images and how she felt when seeing them for the first time.
NOT AN ORDINARY SONG
Majesty
When I was teaching, I always tried to emphasize to my digital imaging or printmaking students that it’s important to create work that gets a reaction from the viewer. Of course, the best reaction is that the viewer loves the work because it speaks to them personally, something about it resonating with their memories, experiences, or feelings. Or perhaps just being in awe of the craft itself, and wishing they could have made that work themselves. For me, the worst that can happen is that the work created no reaction from the viewer. Zero. Nada. That moment when the viewer looks for a couple of seconds, thinks, “Meh, next!!!”, and quickly scuttles to the next image.
Personally, I prefer someone to abhor something I made over that, as at least to get that sort of reaction, they had to give it more than a few seconds. They had to look. I can respect that my work was not their cup of tea for whatever reason, because I see lots of work that is not mine, either. But I still feel like my work succeeded in doing what I wanted, ie, getting a reaction. Perhaps in the age of Instagram, and Insta-attention spans, lingering over an image is asking more than many viewers want to give to a singular artwork. It’s still my preferred way to interact with art, and perhaps one of the reasons that I just do not love Instagram, no matter how much I try to.
[clicking on these images will bring up a lightbox]
I’ve been following Dawn Surratt’s work for a few years now. She has the ability to create quiet, meditative works, both objects, and images, that I find interesting enough that I do linger over them.
Recently I ran across these images from The Silent Year series from which Dawn had created unique images. The handwork expanded the images to another level of wonder. These did far more than speak to me. These sing, but not just any song. They sing like Maria Callas performing upon the world stage, with a voice full of distinctive colors and unforgettable timbres.
I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.
- Diana Nicholette Jeon
Bio
Dawn Surratt earned a B.A. in Studio Arts from the University of North Carolina in Greensboro and a Bachelor's and Master’s Degree in Social Work from the University of Georgia. Her years of work with dying patients in hospice settings is the backbone of her imagery combining photographs with photography-based book structures, installations, and objects as visual meditations exploring concepts of grief, transition, healing, and spirituality.
Her work has been widely published for book covers and publications and has exhibited in galleries across the United States. She was a 2016 and 2020 Critical Mass Finalist and a 2018 nominee for the Royal Photography Society’s 100 Heroines.
Dawn is a full-time artist living in rural North Carolina and teaches multi-media process and photography object work through Maine Media Workshops and College.
More of her work may be found on her website.
Diana Nicholette Jeon is a Honolulu, HI-based artist and an editor at One Twelve publications.