511 GALLERY is pleased to announce the opening of Rebecca Soderholm’s solo exhibition of photography and video, Upstate, on Thursday, March 15th with an opening reception from 6 to 8pm.

This collection of work explores the link between individuals and their surroundings, in which the relationship of the figures to the landscape is often a narrative. This is a story of what she calls “my people, my tribe”. Though placed in northern New York, her images extend to cover any and all small towns.

Soderholm’s upstate is a physical site that beginning in the sixteenth century was inhabited by five tribes that constituted the Iroquois Confederacy. While she does not photograph Native Americans per se, Soderholm documents the lives of more modern tribes of people in the area and their collective human spirit that has sustained them through such so-called progress and violence as the industrial revolution, economic recession, and ongoing war. According to the artist, “pride and poverty grow” simultaneously in the same landscape.

In the tradition of Dorothea Lange’s Depression era photographs, Soderholm humanizes the consequences of economic and physical hardship on those people most affected. She combines into one image a documentary reading with an intimate and emotionally charged self-awareness on the part of her subjects. Her photographs are private moments played out in the gritty reality of the public arena.

Rebecca Soderholm was born in a small town in upstate New York. She received her B.F.A. in Photojournalism from the Rochester Institute of Technology and her M.F.A. in Photography from Yale University, School of Art. Soderholm has participated in a number of group exhibitions, including most recently Onward 11 at Ricoh Ring Cube Gallery in Tokyo and X INITIATIVE at the Dia Art Foundation, New York. An Assistant Professor of Photography at Drew University, Rebecca Soderholm lives and makes work in Madison, New Jersey.