Description

Manship Artists Residency is pleased to announce The Quarry Project: Photographs by Tsar Fedorsky, which opens at the Manship Artists Residency on Friday, June 7 and runs through July 7. The Quarry Project is a continuation of Manship Artist Tsar Fedorsky’s twenty-year practice investigating the properties of black-and-white photography and how it creates abstraction from realism. Begun in 2016, the more recent quarry photographs are a study of duality and tension. They comprise a deep exploration of the familiarity of place, the quarries near Fedorsky’s home in Gloucester. 
Fedorsky explains the meaning behind her work, “ [The photographs] straddle a space between truth and fiction, between the exterior and interior, between fact and dream…We think we are looking up, yet we are really looking down. We think we see the sky, but instead we see the water. What appears to be a mountain, is actually a rock. With the pandemic, war, the dire effects of climate change, and a dangerous political theater — meaning is breaking down, language has lost its meaning, and we are left in a perpetual state of questioning. The Quarry Project embraces this confusion, allows for projection and the possibility that a negative space can be beautiful.”
 
Tsar first worked with Manship Artists Residency in 2020. She collaborated with Marc Zegans, a California-based poet. Due to the pandemic, Zegans was unable to be physically present for the residency so their work revolved around the concepts of presence and absence. Fedorsky captured glimpses of an imagined “ghost” poet in the Manship home. Their collaboration resulted in a limited-edition photo book titled Ghost Book, published in 2024 by Kite String Press. Samantha C. Harvey, a professor of English at Boise State in Boise, Idaho, and a self-proclaimed fan of “creaky old houses,” wrote the foreword for the book. Copies of the book will be available for sale at Fedorsky’s opening reception.
 
Tsar Fedorsky is a photographer based in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Her photographs have been exhibited and published nationally and worldwide. Fedorsky holds an MFA in Photography from the University of Hartford in Connecticut and a BA from Amherst College in Massachusetts. She received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for Creative Arts in Photography in 2018, was a Critical Mass Finalist in 2015 and 2017, and received an Artist Fellowship Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council in 2015. Fedorsky traveled to Brazil as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar in 2023-24. 
 
The exhibition opening and artist’s reception will take place Friday, June 7 from 5:30 to 7:30 pm. Gallery hours will be 1:00 - 4:00 pm on Saturdays and Sundays through July 7 with the exception of June 15 and 16 when the gallery will be closed.