Talia Hodge (1995-)
Spring Rain, 2021; Hope Blooms, 2019;Flourish, 2021
Materials and dimensions: digital photographs each 18" x 24"
Location at Summa: Barberton Joint Center for Excellence, hallway outside Family Lounge
About the art and the artist:
Close-ups ("details") of growing things fill each of these three compositions, printed in large format, by Akron photographer Talia Hodge. She calls our attention to the natural world around us by creating images that celebrate color, light, and surfaces, with the camera on her mobile phone as well as with a digital SLR.
Spring Rain situates us within evergreen boughs that glisten as rain slides down each needle to accumulate in light-filled beads. Notice how her shallow depth-of-field (the area in focus) concentrates our attention on just the foreground, behind which more of the same is implied without having to spell it out. Hodge contrasts our view of the right bough, its drops hanging perilously close to falling, with the left one, where its contrast with the light background also allows us to appreciate the profiled wiriness of each needle.
In Hope Blooms, completed several years before the other photos, the artist chooses one flower seen more completely to star in the image while balanced at the corners by others that are mostly off stage. The deep black background dramatizes the colors and shapes, and the tantalizing partial appearance of the singular yellow tulip both heightens the drama and avoids monotony. Hodge invites us to enjoy the elegant curve of the stem and the beads of precipitation on the central bloom without having to provide it in full view.
Talia Hodge's third image, Flourish, brings us up close to a bright green leaf of a variety of Monstera plant, a favorite of indoor gardeners. Here again the photographer's use of limited depth-of-field brings the beholder in close to observe the varied greens of the leaf's surface and the patterns in its folds and veins. One of these creates that strong, bright central vertical that forces the eye upward, paradoxically into the deep dark negative space created by the leaf's convoluted contour, a kind of visual joke.
The artist earned a B.A. in photo illustration from Kent State University, where she held the Wallace Hagedorn Scholarship for Photography. She also earned a 2022 Reimagine Fellowship from the Akron Black Artists Guild, with funding from the Ohio Arts Council, during which she focused on photographing the Kenmore area of Akron.
Where you can find more works by this artist:
Talia Hodge has exhibited her photographs regularly in and around Akron; she is one of the early members of the Akron Black Artist Guild and has shown with them, with Akron Soul Train, and in the Summa Gallery exhibition "Enhancing our Mood" in early 2022. Her personality shines through her website, where she displays the range of her work, as well as her sense of humor (note the still lifes!).
Where you can find more works like this:
The Summa Collection offers many examples of area artists, including other photographers, who bring details of nature to us in new and exciting ways. Have a look at works by Ryn Clarke,P.J. Rogers, Laurie Jacobs, and Barbara Gillette, to name just a few.
The healing arts at Summa Health
- Next featured artist: John Barlow Hudson
- Homepage: summahealth.org/art
- More artwork in new patient tower