Freshworks Artist Talk: Sue Abramson & Mita Ghosal
KST Presents
Friday, May 1
5:00pm
Pay What Makes You Happy!
For four decades, fine art photographer Sue Abramson has produced work in a variety of methods that connects with the environmental landscape. Mita Ghosal’s cross-disciplinary choreographic work employs movement and spoken language to tell literal and figurative stories. The artists were originally scheduled to present a work in progress showing of their collaboration. Instead they will chat with KST Senior Producer, Ben Pryor about their individual practices, why they were drawn to work together, and what we can look forward to in the future.
Photos by Sue Abramson & Mita Ghostal, Remixed by Annie Tomak.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Sue Abramson is a fine art photographer working in Pittsburgh. For four decades she has produced work using a variety of methods in connection with the environmental landscape. Abramson’s photography focuses on the organic and fragmented composition of nature and explores the process of grief and grieving. Widely exhibited, her work has been acquired for many permanent collections, including The Carnegie Museum of Art, The Polaroid Corporation, University of Pittsburgh, Bibliotheque Nationale, and Blue Cross of Western Pennsylvania. Her exhibited work has been nationally and internationally shown. Featured exhibitions include “Gestures 15” at the Mattress Factory, “Digital to Daguerreotype at The Carnegie Museum of Art, “No Mirrors” at Rayko Photo Center and “Connecting Pittsburgh” at Gallerie Nahore, Ceske Budejovice, Czech Republic. Her recent exhibition at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, The Only Constant is Change, includes garden work made in response to a life in transition. Abramson’s book, A Woodlands Journal is a decades long photographic meditation on her evolving relationship with light, loss, chaos and place. She recently retired from her Associate professor of photography position at Pittsburgh Filmmakers, where she taught for 30 years. Art critic Mary Thomas writing for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette called Abramson’s work “simultaneously confident and humble, assertive and demure…. [Abramson’s] commitment and close observation have resulted in a honed body of work in which the superfluous is eliminated to produce compositions that project beauty and not a little mystery through subjects that are often dismissed as mundane.” To see her most recent portfolios visit sueabramson.com.
Mita Ghosal’s choreographic work is a cross-disciplinary study of contemporary movement and how it intersects with spoken language to tell a story that is full of nuance that is both literal and figurative. As a dance theatre artist of Indian-American decent, early on she discovered that the types of roles she was being asked to play were binary and stereotypically “Indian”. If she wanted to perform and be seen as a whole human being: specic, unique and universal, it was up to her to create the work itself.
Her choreography and performance work explores issues in a wide array of subjects including Indian- American Female Identity, grief and loss and our current health care crisis. Most recently she has been working on a piece entitled High Level Summary that explores workaday, corporate life, capitalism and their parallel relationships with Colonial India and the Swadeshi Movement of West Bengal.
Her work has been presented by many professional venues in New York City including The Asian American Writer’s Workshop, Mulberry Street Theatre, New York Film Institute, the Joseph Papp Public Theatre and the New York International Fringe Festival. In Los Angeles her work has been presented through REDCAT at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Highways Performance Space, Crazy Space, the Fowler Museum of Cultural History, Barnsdall Arts Park, Studio A Dance and the David Henry Hwang Theatre. Since moving back to her hometown of Pittsburgh, she has presented her original style of choreography at the Wood Street Galleries, the NewMoves Contemporary Dance Festival and Raw Artists Pittsburgh, among others.
She holds a BA in Theatre Arts with an Interdisciplinary Focus in Dance through the Pennsylvania State University, an MFA in Dance/Choreography from UCLA, and is a Certified Movement Analyst through the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies in New York.