Joan Fitzsimmons
Primary Medium: Photography
Neighborhood : Hamden
Email: jfitzsimmons8 (at) gmail (dot) com
Website: http://www.joanfitzsimmons.com
Artist Statement
The work presented in my portfolio meanders through varying series, but one thing has always led to another.
I tend to work on several projects at once. I've examined the tenuous, ebbing boundaries between reality and perception. I've asked questions about human relationships, the nature of home, my relationship to nature, and the significance of the quotidian. The ordinary act of living is endlessly complex and uncertain. It is through the ordinary that, for me, the world resonates.
Neighborhood : Hamden
Email: jfitzsimmons8 (at) gmail (dot) com
Website: http://www.joanfitzsimmons.com
Artist Statement
The work presented in my portfolio meanders through varying series, but one thing has always led to another.
I tend to work on several projects at once. I've examined the tenuous, ebbing boundaries between reality and perception. I've asked questions about human relationships, the nature of home, my relationship to nature, and the significance of the quotidian. The ordinary act of living is endlessly complex and uncertain. It is through the ordinary that, for me, the world resonates.
Selected Works
|  Plant Life_Basil_01 - 2009 - silver print - 6"h. x 6" w.  Plant Life_Basil_73 - 2009 - inkjet print - variable  Plant Life_Basil_153 - 2009 - inkjet print - variable  Plant Life_Basil_42 - 2009 - inkjet print - 8"h. x 6"w.  Plant Life_Basil_44 - 2009 - inkjet print - 6"h. x 8"w.  Plant Life_Basil_101 - 2009 - inkjet print - 6"h. x 8" w.  Plant Life_Basil_106 - 2009 - silver print - 6" h. x ^"w.  Cakes.01 - 2004 - silver print - variable  Cakes.14 - 2005 - silver print - variable  Cakes.26 - 2006 - silver print - variable  Cakes.27 - 2006 - silver print - variable  Cakes.38 - 2007 - silver print - variable  Small & Large Thoughts.04 - 2006 - silver print - variable  Small & Large Thoughts.32 - 2007 - inkjet print - variable  Small & Large Thoughts.33 - 2007 - inkjet print - variable  Small & Large Thoughts.34 - 2007 - inkjet print - variable  The Woods_01 - 1999 - selectively bleached and toned silver print - 85"h x 29'w  The Woods_06 - 2002 - selectively bleached and toned silver print - 48 x48 "  The Woods_07 - 2002 - Selectively bleached and toned silver print - 48 x48 "  The Woods_08 - 2002 - Selectively bleached and toned silver print - 4 |
Artist Bio
“My images,” Ms. Fitzsimmons writes, “are an extension of an ongoing investigation into my own perceptions of reality, a concept that I find to be fluctuating and tenuous at best. I fabricate scenes for the photograph that have verisimilitude but small perceptual shifts give them away. I find existing scenes that have an edge of uncertainty. I play with scale, a further manipulation. The black and white image further obfuscates any distinction between the artificial and the organic, rendering one as real as the other.”
Ms. Fitzsimmons has also had solo exhibitions at The Discovery Museum in Bridgeport, CT, Portland State University Portland, Oregon, The Zone Relay Gallery of The Kansas City Art Institute, 4th Street Photo in New York, Artemisia Gallery and Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago. Group shows include 100 Years of Photography, Personal Visions of the 20th Century: The Art and Technology, The Discovery Museum, Bridgeport, CT, Heaven & Hell, Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT, sand The Exquisite Corpse, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland, Dogs, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Light; From Illumination to Pure Radiance, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Her work is in The Brooklyn Museum of American Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Center for Photography at Woodstock, NY, as well as, various other private and
public collections.
Joan Fitzsimmons has lectured on the visual techniques and nuances of photography on such subjects as Freezing the Moment, a study of Harold Edgerton's work on motion, and Georgia O'Keefe and Photography, both at the Whitney Museum of America Art, Stamford branch; and on Restructuring the Photographic Image at Creative Arts Workshop in New Haven. Recently, at Fairfield University, Ms. Fitzsimons curated Out of Into, an exhibition of art in corrections.
Joan Fitzsimmons received her B.F.A. from Washington University School of Fine Arts in St. Louis, MO, and M.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is presently a Professor of Art at Norwalk Community College. She has taught photography at Fairfield University and Creative Arts Workshop in New Haven. For five years she conducted an art program at Webster Correctional Institute in Cheshire, CT