Fanjoy Labrenz Exhibit: “THEN TIME”

October 3–November 8, 2025

Artist Reception, Thursday, October 16 at the Downtown Third Thursday Art Crawl

Sally Fanjoy and James Labrenz, fanjoy labrenz, are artists living and working in Hickory, North Carolina.  Together they push the boundaries of the photographic medium as they explore light: reflection, refraction, transmission, continuity, translucence and connectivity, to create conceptual and site-specific work.

Most recently their work has received a 2025 Innovative Artist Grant from Arts Culture Catawba and been exhibited at the Cain Center for the Arts in Cornelius NC, the Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh, NC, the Charlotte ArtPop Class of 2023, the North Carolina Museum of Art, and ArtFields 2024.

Their project, Light in Space received a grant from the United Arts Council of Catawba County for 2023. An abstract of a 2019 project at the Hickory Museum of Art with Corning Optical Solutions was published in the Yearbook of Moving Image Studies 2021 Augmented Images, Büchner-Verlag.

Artist Statement

We work with light - how it falls, reflects, transmits and connects.  Having merged our lives and work since 1987 we use photography and the camera as a tool to pay attention to the world around us. Our work is constantly evolving and changing just as the ethereal qualities of light.

We choose to keep asking questions of ourselves and create work that manifests in installation, projection, often collaborating with other artists of various disciplines.  Drawing inspiration from luminaries such as Robert Irwin, Andy Goldsworthy, and George Saunders, we echo Walter Percy's sentiment from "The Moviegoer".  “The search is what everyone would undertake if he were not stuck in the everyday-ness of his own life. To be aware of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”