Cheryle St. Onge

Natural Findings

2014 Critical Mass Solo Exhibition Award presented in collaboration with Photolucida

April 1-May 3, 2015

Natural Findings is a photographic exploration of the natural world as one might first experience it as a child. Artist Cheryle St. Onge’s beautifully contemplative black-and-white images depict the curiosity and awe surrounding the initial discoveries of such treasures as “a paper wasp nest that appears dropped from Mars” or “the frog egg mass that, on close inspection...becomes a gelatinous constellation of soon-to-be tadpoles.” For St. Onge, this project is also about the important role that family plays in these early encounters with nature. She observes that, “when an older sibling offers up a jar of glowing fireflies, or grandmother puts a Winter Berry on your tongue, they are in a colloquial, familiar manner forging a path and beckoning to share the natural world.”  

Along with her photographs, Natural Findings will include a display of St. Onge’s personal journals, which are intended to provide insight into the artist’s creative process and her own re-discovery of the earth’s curiosities from behind the camera.

Cheryle St. Onge received her MFA from Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, studying under Nick Nixon and Barbara Bosworth, and interned at M.I.T. creating contact prints of the archives of Dr. Harold Edgerton. For over a decade, she taught photography at Clark University, and art and writing workshops for high school students at the Worcester Art Museum. She has also guest lectured at The University of New Hampshire, University of Rhode Island and New England A.S.I C., and in 2009, she was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in photography. When she is not working as a fine art photographer, St. Onge also provides architectural and editorial photographic work for various clients while dividing her time with her family between Durham, New Hampshire and coastal Maine.