"Meet the Artist" with Anna Leigh Clem and Lori Van Houten

On Thursday, October 10, we welcome Anna Leigh Clem and Lori Van Houten to “Meet the Artist” night at CPW. Clem and Van Houten, aka UMBILICUS, are a mother-daughter collaborative team working with photography, text, book arts, and other media to create work ranging from hand-held objects to room-size installations. Both individually and collectively, they meditate on losing one's way, seeking home, and survival. In their work-in-progress, Dreamland, they study a 3000-year-old dune system to find possible answers to these meditations. During their presentation, Clem and Van Houten will discuss their individual approaches of exploring the same location and collaborative tactics as mother-daughter. Presented works will include independent projects Laden and Northern Circumpolar, their first collaborative work In the Orangery, and Dreamland, their latest collaborative project. They will have copies of their books available for sale and signing. This event will be live-streamed on CPW's YouTube page at 6pm.

Join us every Thursday evening at CPW, when we host illuminating talks with local and visiting artists. “Meet the Artist” allows the public to get to know new work, to hear about artistic processes, and to meet friends and other local artists. The evening takes place at CPW’s gallery at 474 Broadway in Kingston, NY. It is free and open to the public. Coffee, tea, and snacks are served. “Meet the Artist” is made possible by a generous grant from the Arnold and Augusta Newman Foundation.

Anna Leigh Clem is an artist and educator working in photography, text, book arts, video, sculpture, and other media to investigate the nature of ephemerality. Compelled by the ineffable secrets embedded in memories, dreams, and the natural world, her work makes tangible these otherwise invisible realms. Clem holds a Master of Fine-Arts in photography and integrated media from Lesley University (2021) and a Bachelor of Fine-Arts in photography from Rochester Institute of Technology (2012). Her work has been shown both nationally and internationally, at venues such as Bromfield Gallery, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, Foley Gallery, Visual Studies Workshop, Camera Club of New York, Davis Orton Gallery, The Griffin Museum of Photography, GuatePhoto Festival, and Elysium Gallery. She has published both trade edition books and artist’s books, several of which are held in collections at The Griffin Museum of Photography, Yale University, SMFA, SVA, and Pratt Institute. Clem is currently based on the North Shore of Boston and teaches at Montserrat College of Art and Northeastern University.

Lori Van Houten has exhibited her work extensively for 45 years and is in the collections of the New York Public Library, the International Center of Photography, St. Louis Art Museum and Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as university and corporate collections. She has been a frequent exhibitor at the Carrie Haddad Gallery in Hudson, NY and other Hudson Valley locations. Returning to making artist books after a hiatus of several decades, she has recently published small press trade books and several series of handmade artist books produced in small editions. Her five-part series Flutter Fall will be joining the collection of the Morgan Library and Museum. In 2020 she traveled to the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico and Banaras, India for artist residencies and in recent years has been awarded other international residencies in County Kerry, Ireland, and Kyoto Prefecture, Japan. Lori lives in Accord, New York.

Banner images: Anna Leigh Clem and Lori Van Houten.

Host or Publisher The Center for Photography at Woodstock