Columbia Regional Visitors Center Artist of the Month


AOTM Print Collection – Images by Brett Flashnick

I am completely humbled that I have been selected as the Columbia Regional Visitors Center “Artist of the Month” for November 2010. Photographic prints will be on display and available for purchase throughout the entire month of November at the Visitors Center located inside the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center (1101 Lincoln Street).

We are kicking things off with a happy hour drop-in on Thursday, Nov. 4, 2010. Please join us for beer, wine and light hors d’oeuvres from 5:30-7:30pm at the Visitors Center in the Vista.

If you can’t make it to the happy hour, I will be at the Visitors Center all day, so feel free to stop by when you have a moment. These photographic prints make unique Christmas gifts. To help you get started with your holiday shopping all prints will be discounted 10-25% from 8:30am-7:30pm on the 4th.

The after-show glow…

My first fine art photography show Symbology, installed in the black box theatre at the Columbia Music Festival association.
My first fine art photography show Symbology, installed in the black box theatre at the Columbia Music Festival association.

As I sat on the porch where I currently live, listening to the water fall in the Koi pond, and trying to catch up on growing email inbox this morning, I ran across a facebook message from a few weeks ago that new friend and fellow artist Anastasia Chernoff sent, after visiting my photo show, the subject of that message was “The after-show glow…”  In her message she equated the emotions of putting your first show together, to giving birth to a baby (something I’ll never know about), and went on to say “…the opening night was all so beautifully surreal. An incredible high that, to this day, STILL resonates within me when I think about it.”  That last statement is something I can now completely understand though.  Now that I look back on the whole experience of my show which closed at the conclusion of the 2009 Artista Vista three weeks ago, it STILL resonates within me, and I’m sure it will continue to, for the rest of my life.  While my entire life has been a complete whirlwind for the past 3 months, filled with the stresses of work, travel, putting on my first show, and trying to buy my first home, I sit here this morning feeling the calmest, and certainly the most content I’ve been in the past 8 months, all thanks to the wonderful friends, and family who now share my life with me.

Continue reading “The after-show glow…”

My Artista Vista show “Symbology”

I believe that our culture is founded on, and formed by symbols that enable us to connect what we can see with those things that can only be understood by our souls.  The symbols we use to express our patriotism, faith, love, and even socioeconomic status, are simply an outward expression of the desire we all share as human beings to belong to something larger than ourselves. The representation of these symbols in the images I have created reflects the way I see what my subjects present, as a means of communicating their belonging to the world around them.

A political protester grasps a confederate battle flag, outside of town hall meeting at Seawell's, in Columbia, S.C., for Republican presidential hopeful John McCain.

The proceeding statement was the founding basis for my first fine art photography show titled “Symbology,” which contains 15 16×20 format silver halide prints, from editorial images which I have created over the past decade as a freelance photojournalist.

The show will run April 23-25, 2009, at the Columbia Music Festival Association located at 914 Pulaski St. in Columbia, SC. Click Here to View a Map. 

Symbology will open with a free reception on Art Night, Thursday, April 23, 2009 from 4-9pm.

The show will continue on Friday, April 24, 2009, with gallery hours from 11am-3pm, followed by a special performance from local rock band, All Walks of Life from 7pm-Until.  Tickets for the show are $5, and can be purchased at CMFA in advance or at the door.

Gallery hours will continue on Saturday, April 25, 2009 from 11am-3pm, and will conclude with a special talk, and question and answer session from 2-3pm.

For more information on Artista Vista, Columbia’s Premier Gallery Crawl, visit their website www.artistavista.com or Click Here to download a PDF gallery map.

Orphan Works 2008

On Friday, September 26, 2008, the United States Senate passed their version of the Orphan Works legislation by hotline. A hotline is an informal term for a request to members of the Senate to agree to allow a bill or resolution to be approved by the Senate without debate or amendment (for more information on hotline process read this article by Sen. Tom Colburn).

Currently the House version of The Orphan Works Act of 2008 bill, H.R. 5889, is in the House Judiciary Committee, and while it is not as damaging as the Senate version S.2913, either version of the bill would cause catastrophic harm to creative communities which depend on protections of their intellectual property, provided under current Copyright law.

According to the Orphan Works Act of 2008, an “orphan work” is defined as any copyrighted work whose author is unable to be located by an infringer who claims they have performed a “reasonably diligent search” (however it in no way gives any parameters as to what a reasonably diligent search is. In a departure from existing copyright law and business practice, the U.S. Copyright Office has proposed that Congress grant such infringers freedom to ignore the rights of the author and use the work for any purpose, including commercial usage.

This proposal goes far beyond current concepts of fair use.  It is written so broadly that it will expose new works to infringement, even where the author is alive, in business, and licensing the work.  The bill would substantially limit the copyright holder’s ability to recover financially or protect the work, even if the work was registered with the U.S. Copyright Office prior to infringement.  The bill also has a disproportionate impact on visual artists such as photographers, because it is common for an artist’s, work to be published without credit lines or because credit lines can be removed electronically removed by others in our current, electronic age, where many of these images wind up on the internet.

The Orphan Works Act would force artists to risk their lives’ work to subsidize the start-up ventures of private, profit making registries, using untested image recognition technology and untried business models. These models would inevitably favor the aggregation of images into corporate databases over the licensing of copyrights by the lone artists who create the art.  The most common scenario of orphaning in visual art is the unmarked image. There is only one way to identify the artist belonging to an unmarked image. That would be to match the art against an image-recognition database where the art resides with intact authorship information. These databases would become one-stop shopping centers for infringers to search for royalty-free art. Any images not found in the registries could be considered orphans.  There is no limit to the number of these registries nor the prices they would charge artists for the coerced registration of their work.

In the end, the artist would bear the financial burden of paying for digitizing and depositing the digitized copy with the commercial registries.  Almost all visual artists such as painters, illustrators and photographers are self employed. The number of works created by the average visual artist far exceeds the volume of the most prolific creators of literary, musical and cinematographic works. The cost and time-consumption to individual artists of registering tens of thousands of visual works, at even a low fee, would be prohibitive; therefore countless working artists would find existing works orphaned from the moment they create them.  The Copyright Office has stated explicitly that failure of the artist to meet this burden of registration would result in their work automatically becoming an orphan and subject to legal infringement.

I don’t feel that there are words strong enough to tell you how important it is to personally contact your Representative in the United States House, and ask them to stand against this piece of legislation.  However if you don’t have enough time to call or write them personally please visit http://capwiz.com/illustratorspartnership/issues/alert/?alertid=11980321 or  http://www.petitiononline.com/Stop2913/petition.html or http://www.house.gov/.

If you would like to find out more information please visit http://owoh.org/.