Photo shoot for City Paper's feature on local fashion designers

Check out the pics that I took of some very talented local designers. My pictures were featured in an article about local fashion designers in the City Paper.

Cavallario-Roberts Family Portrait Session

I had the best time taking pictures of this lovely family. It was a bright but warm Fall day, and the kids were adorable and full of energy. Adam was jumping around, it wasn't hard to get great, animated pictures of him. Little Sophia surprised me by looking straight at the camera. This was the youngest-1 month-baby I've ever shot and I must admit that I was a bit apprehensive about this photo shoot. But it ended up being breezy-easy and lots of fun!

Bethany's Senior Portrait Session

The weather was pretty miserable this week but thankfully cleared up for Bethany's photo shoot.

With our props and camera equipment we went all over the beautiful Toledo Botanical Gardens. Her photo shoot was super fun!

Click on the title to see more of the shoot.

Artomatic 419

Check out the pictures I took at this year's Artomatic 419, one of Ohio's biggest art events.

Mark Moffett's Tree

Mark Moffett is a local artist that makes the most bizarre and fantastic sculptures out of ordinary, everyday things.

Here he made a sculpture out of shoes for the recent Artomatic 419 and hired me to document his work.

Derby party at the Museum

Check out the pictures I took of the Derby party last spring at the Museum!

It was such a fantastic event; everybody was dressed up in their Derby best, and the excitement of the races took over the entire event!

I'm pretty sure the Museum will be hosting these parties every year to coincide with the Kentucky Derby. Make sure you go next year--I will!

Photo Shoot with Raq the Casbah

Local bellydance and music troupe Raq the Casbah asked me to take some promotional shots of them. We had a fantastic shoot outside of the museum, one of my favorite places in town to have a photo shoot in Toledo!

These guys are super-talented and put on a fabulous show. Check out their facebook page for their next performance.

Tina Gionis Photography is now on Facebook

Please check it out!

Tina Gionis Photography

A Frame of Reference-MFA Show

For those of you who weren't able to attend my Master of Fine Art Thesis Show, here are the images, video, and artist's statement.

Body of work as it appears in the gallery:

Detail shots of individual images:

                           

Link to the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ziyhdynDfg

 Artist's Statement

Writer Susan Sontag once said, “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”

One of the things that has always fascinated me about photography is this “freezing of time,” if you will. It’s always amazed me that though life marches on in an unstoppable flux, moments can be frozen in the form of photographs and revisited.

The contact sheet format in this body of work is a reference to contact sheets that are used in film photography. When looking at a contact sheet, one expects to find a linear progression through time. However, when looking at the contact sheets that I digitally created, the viewer sees a movement of time that skips from past to present to past again. This nonlinear portrayal of time shows how the past influences the present when memories are recalled. It’s also shown in the video I am exhibiting, where old home movies are layered with recently shot footage. Both the video and digital images also express how much of an impact memory can have on the present, which in essence, is the basis of grieving.

I lost my mother two years ago to cancer. The day after she died, I learned that my family home that was in her name and that I was supposed to inherit was going to be seized by the government to pay outstanding medical bills. It is a huge loss for me on two levels: a loss of a loved one and a loss of a legacy.

My grandparents emigrated from Greece seventy years ago and were typical participants in the American Dream of the twentieth century. They initially lived in a one-room apartment in downtown Toledo, worked hard to make their business successful which eventually enabled them to buy a house where both my mother and I were raised. Being the only kin, it is up to me to clear this home of personal property before it gets turned over to the government. Going through three generations of personal possessions brings up a multitude of memories and intensifies the grieving process. My mother was a professional bellydancer, taking the art very seriously. She performed both internationally and nationwide, made her costumes by hand, and owned her own dance school where she taught bellydancing. As I pack up her things, I come across her costumes, sewing materials, instructional books, and other items that she used for performing and teaching. Her vocational devotion has been one way that I have been remembering her.

Consequently, I have been learning firsthand how the past affects the present in the form of memories, whether they are joyful reminiscences or longing to be with ones that are gone. I’ve also been learning that elation and loss are both integral facets of life. Existence is fleeting and years go by, but photographs can bring back memories that sometimes seem like the only things we can truly possess.

Video wins First Place at Salon des Refuses Show

I was shooting event photos at the Toledo Area Artists Show when I happened to look at a brochure for the Salon des Refuses show that was simultaneously happening across the street. I saw my name in the awards section and realized that the video I had submitted had won first place! I rushed over in just in time for the awards ceremony. It's not too cool having your work turned down from a show, but I must say it's pretty fantastic winning an award for it from another!

Click here to watch the video.

MFA show this Friday!

So after two years of blood, sweat, and tears I'm graduating with a Master of Fine Arts! It will be a Master in Digital Art with a focus on photography and video. I can't believe I'm almost there and that I'm almost done with graduate school.

I chose a really hard subject for my thesis show, and more than a few times wasn't sure if I was going to be able to finish the body of work because of its difficulty. The thesis of my show is about time; how the past affects the present in the form of memory and especially grieving. I used my own personal experience of just recently having lost my mom and our family home to pay for medical bills. It made sense to me, at the beginning of my program in grad school, to deal with this topic as that was what I was dealing with at the time. Little did I realize that perhaps some things can be too traumatic to make a body of work from or to deal with at that particular time. I realized this halfway through my grad program when it became too clear that all the work I was making was pretty unsuccessful.

I wanted to abandon the whole idea of making a body of work that deals with the loss of my mom because it was too painful, and because I was still trying to process it and accept it. But my graduate committee urged me to push on. I did and I ended up making a body of work that I am happy with. But, whew!-it sure wasn't easy getting there. I believe this body of work is the most challenging one I've ever made. And now that it's done and over with, I'm beginning to realize that pushing through and forcing myself to make this work has helped me process the loss anyways.

So if you want to see it, it will be up at the Dorothy Uber Bryan Gallery at the Fine Arts Center at Bowling Green State University.

The opening is this Friday April 22nd 7pm-9pm and will be up until May 3rd. If you can't make it to the opening, the gallery is open Tues through Sat 11-4 and Thurs 6-9. Also Sunday 1-4 but closed on Easter.