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CDFAC Gallery Exhibition Reception: Night Calls

in Art EventsChristel DeHaan Fine Arts Center Gallery

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  • Exhibition reception: Thursday, October 3, 4-6pm. Free and open to the public, all are welcome. 

    Night Calls is an homage to poet and photographer Rebecca Norris Webb’s 100-plus-year-old doctor father and to the Indiana landscape. For six years, she retraced the route of some of his house calls through rural Rush County, where they both were born. Echoing his work rhythms, she photographed mainly at night and in the early morning, when many of us come into the world—her father delivered some thousand babies—and when many of us leave it. She visited a number of the small town and rural homes of his former patients and their descendants to make collaborative portraits, trying her best to channel his gentle bedside manner. Accompanying the photographs, lyrical text pieces addressed to her father create a series of handwritten letters told at a slant. 

    Ultimately, Night Calls is a meditation on fathers and daughters, on memory and one’s first landscape, on caretaking of the land and its inhabitants, and on the suffering each of us carries and the legacy of compassion.

    Night Calls was published as a limited-edition photobook by Radius Books in 2021. You can learn more about the Night Calls book here: https://www.radiusbooks.org/all-books/p/rebecca-norris-webb-night-calls

    About the artist:
    Originally a poet, Rebecca Norris Webb (b. Rushville, Indiana, 1956) often interweaves her text and photographs in her nine books, most notably with her monograph, My Dakota—an elegy for her brother who died unexpectedly—with a solo exhibition of the work at The Cleveland Museum of Art in 2015. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Le Monde, National Geographic, and is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Cleveland Museum of Art, and George Eastman Museum, Rochester, N.Y. An NEA grant recipient, Norris Webb’s upcoming 10th book, A Difficulty Is a Light (Chose Commune, Fall 2024) will coincide with an Alessia Paladini Gallery exhibition in Milan. She’s currently working on an ongoing project in the Dakotas, Badlands, as well as the upcoming book, Glimmerings, a selection of some three decades of her lyrical photographs.

    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/webb_norriswebb/
    Website: https://webbnorriswebb.co/