Harmony & Dissonance

The Plymouth Arts Center and sponsor, Van Horn Auto proudly present Harmony & Dissonance, a juried show featuring the works of CoPA, the Coalition of Photographic Arts. The public is invited to the festive opening reception on Friday, August 18 from 5 to 7:30 pm with awards and comments presented at 6 pm. Musical entertainment for the evening will be provided by the Gypsy Swing Chicks, Kate Pearce, Karen Mani, and Beth Munns.

The Coalition of Photographic Arts was founded in 2004 by a group of Milwaukee area photographers passionate about sharing their skills, experience and enthusiasm for the medium. Working with students, beginners, other professional photographers, ardent amateurs and artists, our founders explored fine art photography from an aesthetic, technical and developmental perspective, which remains the foundation of CoPA’s mission. Today, the fine arts photography organization carries on our founders’ vision of promoting photographic excellence through educational programs, lectures, panel discussions, workshops, field trips and Milwaukee photography exhibitions. CoPA forges relationships within the photographic community and the arts community as a whole through monthly meetings, portfolio reviews, museum and gallery tours, juried member exhibitions, sponsored events and much more.

For this juried exhibition, CoPA Members were invited to submit entries that each represent harmony, dissonance, or both. Ken Hanson and Paul Cebar were selected as jurors. They bring a unique perspective to the judging process, combining their affection for a wide range of musical flavors with a keen understanding of what makes an audience tick. Ken adds an element of visual expertise to the judging process, which is sure to produce a tasty show! In music, harmony is the arrangement and layering of musical notes and chords to a pleasing effect. Dissonance is a lack of harmony, a tension or clash from the combination of cacophonous elements. Both are tectonic. The harmonious and the dissonant make up our unique understanding of the natural world. But when we take sound off the table, such as with a photograph, how do we tell the story of these ubiquitous yet intangible concepts? Is there a harmonious or dissonant grammar to visual imagery? Do harmony and dissonance mutually define one another? Does the presence or lack of one amplify the other? Is there light without darkness?

About the Judges: Ken Hanson is a recent inductee into the Wisconsin Advertising Hall of Fame. It has been said that anyone who knows Ken Hanson understands that he leads a life driven by ideas and curiosity. He credits many influences for his approach to living and leading, including photographer-artist Steven D. Foster; designer Milton Glaser; those gathered at the Aspen Design Conferences; former boss at the Edgewood Agency, Lewis Friedman; the 1970s photography collective Perihelion; cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson; an early client John Constable; John Lennon; and his own son, artist and photographer Harry James Hanson. Ken is also a fine art photographer and filmmaker, currently working on several bodies of photographic work and a documentary film about photographer Art Shay. He is also a bass player in two bands, Panalure and Longacre.

Paul Cebar, singer, guitarist and bandleader whose blend of African, Latin American and Caribbean music has rocked, swayed and thrilled audiences since the mid-70s, is another iconic figure born right here in our backyard. Paul produced four LPs with his band Paul Cebar and the Milwaukeeans, and has earned equally impressive accolades with his project Tomorrow Sound. Cebar has made fans out of artists like Bonnie Raitt, Nick Lowe, and Joe Ely, who calls the Milwaukee singer-songwriter an “American original.” According to Lowe, he’s “the real thing — a proper soulful cat with the tunes, the chops and the voice to swing this epoch back to its senses.”