It was the Monterey Museum of Art, or more precisely its curator John Rexine, that put these two California photographers together. It’s a pairing that makes sense, though, as both Bay Area denizen Diane Pierce and Carmel resident Susan Hyde Greene are all about challenging the traditional medium of photography. For both artists, “a flat photo” – to use Greene’s expression – is just a beginning.
This is Pierce’s largest exhibit to date. Reflecting on her artistic journey, she confesses she was at first too shy to pursue photography, which seemed to her, back in college, a male-dominated field. When she was finally ready, she discovered she likes to “work” on her photos, manipulating them in one way or another.
Her work often studies physical leftovers from the artist’s process and everyday life. Pierce begins with a small tabletop and starts “setting up my little scene,” she says, using material like safety pins, wrappers, packaging paper, bamboo skewers. She is driven by the need to change them “into something else.”
The resulting constructions could stand as art on their own, but they “tend to fall apart,” she says, the fragile creatures of paper and such that they are. She immortalizes them by taking countless pictures.
Greene is similarly deconstructive in her journey through photography. She has been cutting photos and stitching them back together since the 1990s when she first started to show her work. She associates stitching and sewing with a long family tradition; her mother, her sisters and cousins used to meet and sew together. “I’ve been sewing since I was four,” she says, recalling her mother’s sewing projects that inspired her cut-outs. Her work is a mix of the two – photography that she discovered in college and her family traditions.
All the images she is showing at MMA are of flowers. She started with roses someone sent to her in the spring of 2020. Their beauty and hope inspired her both as an artist and a woman whose partner was growing increasingly sick. He died of cancer in 2022, and Greene says the exhibit, especially the large wall installation titled The Heartbreaking Beauty, are a tribute to him: “I never considered photographing flowers before. They represent life and beauty that ends.”