Artist: Carolyn Monastra

Carolyn Monastra received her first camera on her 15th birthday and started printing her own work in the basement darkroom her father built in their Cleveland home. The highschooler's early passion for photography deepened with photography classes at the Cleveland Institute of Art.

Monastra received a BA in English Literature from Fordham University in the Bronx. Following a stint as a social worker (for the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and a psychiatric hospital in Philadelphia), she left for Yale University, where she received an MFA in photography.

The current exhibition features work from two recent series. Each photograph in the series "The Dominion of Trees," created between 2001-04 at artist residencies in the northeast, is a landscape narrative, usually featuring a single character in a story--the viewer's alone to unravel.

"I was reading a lot of fairytales at the time and was inspired by these, my dreams, myths, my connection to nature, as well as the exquisite natural beauty at these residencies," explains the artist.

In "lovely, dark and deep," an ongoing series named from a line in the Robert Frost poem, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," the artist continues her quest for recording quiet, devotional moments in nature, all photographed at dusk.

Monastra has exhibited her work in many galleries including Julie Saul, Capsule, and Exit Art in NY, as well as at Miami Art Basel with Ambrosino Gallery, the Tokyo Art Fair, the Palm Beach Contemporary Art Fair and more. This is her first exhibition at SEFA.