Portsmouth, New Hampshire’s Public Art Review Committee Announces Fall Art Show at City Hall with Sept. 28 Opening

 

PORTSMOUTH – Following the success of its first invitational exhibition, the Public Art Review Committee announces the second invitational showcase of visual art by Seacoast artists. The show, Light Falls: A Focus on Light, Shadow, and the Slow Dimming of the Year, features the work of four Seacoast area photographers. An artists’ reception and opening is scheduled for Monday, Sept. 28 from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at City Hall, 1 Junkins Ave. in Portsmouth.

Audrey Level began her photography education at Roberto Mata Taller de Fotografia in Caracas, Venezuela, where she worked with analog and digital processes. She holds a master's degree in communication from Eastern Michigan University and a master’s degree in photographic creation from the Lens School of Visual Arts in Madrid. She has expanded her practice through experimental photography with Anne Eder and is participating in the Penumbra Foundation’s Long Term Program: The Photobook. Level views art as a way to enter new territory where poetry and philosophy meet, questions become images, and images become new words. Her work focuses on fleeting moments and people who often pass unnoticed, inviting questions about seeing and what it means to envision the future while moving through the present.

Ron St. Jean has been a professional portrait, event, and fine art photographer for more than 40 years. He has spent most of his life in New Hampshire, with a home in Barrington since 1976, and maintains a studio in Dover’s Washington Street Mill. His work has been exhibited at the New Hampshire Art Association gallery in Portsmouth and at The Art Center in Dover. Light is always the most important tool in his photography and the primary subject of his work. It illuminates, reflects and reveals texture, translucence and shadows, creating either a hard edge or a diffused glow.

Michael Rodríguez Torrent worked as a camera assistant on feature films, television series, and commercials before being drawn to the more contemplative nature of still photography. He earned a degree in theater from Arizona State University. His work has recently appeared the New Hampshire Art Association, Katzman Contemporary Projects, Wentworth-Gardner Historic House, the Griffin Museum of Photography, and Kimball Jenkins. He approaches the world with a sense of wonder, seeking out the strangeness and beauty in everyday life.

Se Choi is a New Hampshire-based artist pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in photography at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. He graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 2024 with his Bachelor of Fine Arts focused on drawing and photography. He received second place in the college division of the Distinguished Journalism Contest in 2023, and the Lotte Jacobi Award in 2025. Choi believes that everyone has a responsibility to pass on personal and ancestral history, which he documents and categorizes through images. His work conveys memories and stories of his forefathers, through a carousel of objects and glimpses of figures spinning together in the harmony of the everlasting.

Portsmouth City Hall is located at 1 Junkins Ave. in Portsmouth and is open to the public on Mondays, 8 am-6 pm, Tuesdays-Thursdays, 8 am-4:30 pm and Fridays, 8 am-1 pm. City Hall is closed on federal Holidays.