Sweet Briar College will kick off its 2004-05 fall arts season with varied exhibitions from three dynamic area artists who will deliver gallery talks followed by receptions on Fridays from 4:30-6 p.m. on the SBC campus. The artists and locations of their talks and displays are:

• Brad Hamilton - Sept. 3, Benedict Art Gallery, on display through Oct. 24;
• Carrie Cann: "Out of the Darkness" - Sept. 10, Babcock Fine Arts Center lobby, on display through Oct. 17;
• Nancy Witt - Oct. 8, Babcock Art Gallery, on display through Oct. 8;

Amherst resident Brad Hamilton will present selections from his extensive photography work. The University of Delaware graduate furthered his study in photography at the University of Texas and The Daily Texan newspaper. Since moving to Sweet Briar with his wife, Tracy Hamilton, SBC assistant professor of art history, he has worked as manager of the College's digital images collection and as a freelance photographer.

"These photos here will always be the moment of everything in the lens happening at once; a fraction of a second with the potential to last forever," Hamilton says in his Artist's Statement. "At the same time the image will not transcend itself. It is ‘somehow stupid' until we see it, and perhaps it remains so even while we view it … For me this paradox of the photographic image is inescapable and it is what I find so redeeming about making photographs."

Carrie Cann graduated from Sweet Briar in May. Her "Out of the Darkness" exhibition is the culmination of her recent SBC Summer Honors Research Project based on pinhole cameras and photography. She made a variety of pinhole cameras using box-like objects - including a suitcase and a textbook - with a pinhole-sized "lens" and various types of film.

"My original intent for my summer research project was to photograph dreams," Cann says in her Artist's Statement. "In the process, I discovered that I was photographing dreams of a woman struggling with depression ... Through these photographs, I travel through the cycle and conclude with a message of hope, that with help and determination, people can overcome the debilitating effects of depression and learn to live with themselves..."

Nancy Witt, a resident of Hanover County, has completed more than 600 paintings in a 40-year career. She has a bachelor of arts degree in art from Old Dominion University and also attended Richmond Professional Institute (now VCU) and Randolph-Macon Woman's College. Her widely collected paintings are found in many corporate and museum collections including Wheat First Securities, Circuit City, the University of Virginia, and the Mint Museum of Art.

"Because of the complexity of many of my paintings," Witt says in her Artist's Statement, "I'm sure that it might be supposed that they are meticulously thought out beforehand. The opposite is true. A small thumbnail sketch … is usually all that precedes putting brush to canvas. At that point some ‘thing' has excited by libido visually and I'm off."

The exhibitions are supported by the SBC Lectures and Events Committee. For more information, please contact Rebecca Massie Lane, director of SBC galleries, at (434) 381- 6248 or rmlane@sbc.edu, or Shannon Wells, media relations coordinator, at 381-6388 or swells@sbc.edu