Hartsville, S.C. – January 22, 2018  –  Coker College’s Cecelia Coker Bell Gallery presents Kristine Thompson’s “Touching Pictures” exhibition, which begins with a reception at 7pm on Monday, February 5, 2018, and will continue through Friday, March 2, 2018. The opening reception is free, open to the public, and light refreshments will be served.

Thompson’s images are made by pressing light sensitive paper against her laptop screen in the darkroom. By using images from the news from stories about death and violence, she is attempting to present a visual archive of loss. She says, “My work considers how contemporary photographic imagery circulates and often addresses social and emotional responses to representations of death and mourning. I bring references from different historical periods into a shared visual space in order to initiate a conversation between the past and the present, to imagine a tactile connection or relationship with people who are no longer around, and to question how photographs might elicit empathy.”

Thompson is currently an Assistant Professor in Photography at Louisiana State University.

She received her B.S. with an emphasis in visual art, art history and sociology from the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She received her M.F.A. in Studio Art from the University of California in Irvine.

 For more information, please contact exhibition director Ashley Gillespie at 843-621-3005 or ashley.gillespie@coker.edu.

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The Cecelia Coker Bell Gallery is open 10am to 4pm Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and from 10am to 8pm on Tuesday and Thursday while classes are in session. The Gallery is located in the Gladys C. Fort Art Building on the campus of Coker College in Hartsville, South Carolina.   For more on the gallery, please visit www.ceceliacokerbellgallery.com.

Coker College upholds and defends the intellectual and artistic freedom of its faculty and students as they study and create art through which they explore the full spectrum of human experience. The college considers such pursuits central to the spirit of inquiry and thoughtful discussion, which are at the heart of a liberal arts education.