NORTH ADAMS, MA – Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts’ MCLA Gallery 51 next will present a multimedia exhibition of new work by North Adams artist Rich Remsberg, to include found and archival footage, photos, sound recordings and more.
The exhibition, “Terms of Surrender,” will begin on Thursday, June 26, 6-9 p.m., with an opening reception at the downtown gallery. The event is free and open to the public.

Remsberg is a filmmaker and artist who works primarily with found and archival historical material. The show will represent a cross-section of his work.

“Rich’s expertise lies not only in his ability to find obscure historical documents but in framing or re-framing them to draw meaning from what could be disregarded as marginal or purely sentimental,” said Sean Riley, MCLA Gallery 51 manager.
As an archival image researcher, Remsberg has worked mainly on independent films and documentaries for PBS, including “American Masters,” “American Experience,” and the Grammy-nominated “People Take Warning!”
According to Remsberg, he bumps into pieces of forgotten history while he’s doing research, such as accidentally lyrical footage tucked away in a Treasury Department film, or a 1940s incident of religiously-motivated poisoning next to a news story about a submarine that he needs.

“As experience becomes compressed into history, stories become simpler and scrubbed cleaner,” Remsberg said. “Teasing it back apart, I find it full of broken fragments that, if you hold them up to the light or turn them to a slightly different angle, they look different than we expect them to. The items that are just weird or that only remind us that there were screwed-up teenagers before 1960 make for a good read, but the material I find truly compelling are the images that tell a different story than we tend to tell ourselves about who we are as a people.”

Remsberg’s short film, “Jeweler’s Eye,” premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival earlier this year, and “Common Pictures: A Journey Through the Eyes of Found Photography,” was an opening act for the electronic music duo, “The Books,” on their spring 2007 tour.

He is the author of “Hard Luck Blues: Roots Music Photographs from the Great Depression,” forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press. Described as “eloquent photography” by the New Yorker, Remsberg’s first book, “Riders for God: The Story of a Christian Motorcycle Gang,” found an audience from Harvard University to the Texas prison system. As a photographer, his work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek.com, The Christian Science Monitor, and No Depression. He has served on the faculty of the Library of Congress' American Folklife Center Field School and received several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Remsberg lives in North Adams with his wife, Lisa Nilsson.

The exhibition will run through July 27. MCLA Gallery 51 is at 51 Main St., North Adams. The Gallery is open daily, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. For more information, 413-664-8718.