‘From AVP to MVD’ exhibit at Circle Centre
Guests mingle and admire the artwork in the ‘AVP to MVD’ exhibit at the Circle Centre for the arts in downtown Wilkes-Barre, where the exhibit will remain through March 14.
Mary Therese Biebel | Times Leader
Olivia Deluca talks about an image she captured of a friend who is a dancer — posing in a Wilkes-Barre backyard.
Mary Therese Biebel | Times Leader
Cecilia Pons, left, came to the opening reception to congratulate her friend and fellow Wyoming Seminary student Olivia Deluca, whose work will remain on display at the Circle Centre in Wilkes-Barre through March 14.
Mary Therese Biebel | Times Leader
Olivia Deluca captured this image after suggesting that her photography mentor’s daughter stand near a gutter during a rainstorm.
Mary Therese Biebel | Times Leader
With a violin bow and what seem to be hand-fashioned instruments, a street mussician plays in New York City’s China Town in this photo by Olivia Deluca.
Mary Therese Biebel | Times Leader
Local resident Jim Spak is proud to wear a cap with an environmental message, ‘Make America Green Again.’ Photographer Olivia Deluca captured the image on Wilkes-Barre’s Public Square.
Mary Therese Biebel | Times Leader
Wyoming Seminary teacher Chris Pons admires a photo Olivia Deluca shot during her travels. ‘There’s something magical about a horse running along a beach,’ he said.
Mary Therese Biebel | Times Leader
If you need help deciphering the name of her photography exhibit, 15-year-old Olivia Deluca is happy to oblige.
“AVP is the airport code for Avoca,” she said. “And MVD is for the Montevideo airport in Uruguay.”
The young photographer, a Wyoming Seminary sophomore whose work is on display at the Wyoming Valley Art League’s Circle Centre for the Arts in downtown Wilkes-Barre through March 14, has shot many photos here in Northeastern Pennsylvania and in Uruguay, where her mother was born and her family recently visited, as well as at locations in between.
Dozens of art lovers and other well-wishers attended an opening reception for the “AVP to MVD” solo photo exhibit on Thursday and if they had a chance to chat with Olivia, they no doubt realized that each of her photographs tells a story.
“I saw him on Public Square and said, ‘Oh my God, I love your hat,’ ” Olivia said of a photo of local resident Jim Spak, who was sporting a baseball cap that proclaimed his environmentalist philosophy: “Make America Green Again.”
“The message is so relevant, especially today,” Olivia said.
The ballerina posing with flowers is a friend who posed in Olivia’s Wilkes-Barre backyard … a street musician in China Town “seemed to fall asleep every 10 seconds, except when she was playing her music” and, much further south, the “thousands and thousands of fish” swimming unseen under a bridge were feasting on meat that remained in conch shells humans had discarded.
In another photo from Northeastern Pennsylvania, Olivia said, a storm interrupted a day she had been spending with other students mentored by photographer Jamie Smith through his Social Fabric Collective program. “We were at Jamie’s lake house, or I guess it’s more of a river house,” she said.
Soon it seemed like a river was flowing from the rain gutter of a nearby shed. Olivia suggested that Jamie’s daughter Charlotte stand under the deluge, so that she could capture a dramatic photo.
“I’m very proud of her,” Smith said of his protegee, adding that he is “thrilled with the way this (the exhibit) came together.”
Don Armstrong from the Circle Centre told Smith in January he was looking for something to fill the second floor gallery for a few weeks, just as Olivia was ready to share photos from her travels. “It was a perfect storm,” Smith said.
Olivia, who has worked as a waitress and helped in the kitchen at MVD, the restaurant her parents, Valeria Sartor and Salvatore Deluca, own and operate on Parrish Street in Wilkes-Barre, isn’t sure what kind of career she might eventually pursue.
“I’ll interested in biology and pathology,” she said, adding with a gesture toward the photographs on the wall at the Circle Centre, “and then there’s this.”
Whether her photography remains a hobby or becomes a profession, guests at the opening reception said they appreciate her work.
“I think it’s beautiful,” said Olivia’s schoolmate Cecilia Pons. “I love the color contrasts.”
“Some pictures are just something you look at,” said Karolina Harvanova, another fellow student. “But these capture the emotion, the personal.”
Gallery visitors from other generations also found her work intriguing, as Times Leader history and genealogy columnist Tom Mooney noted in an email after attending the reception.
“As I was making my way down the walls full of photos, my eye was caught by two splotches of bright color in a framed artwork. There was no title card next to it,” he wrote. “As I was trying to ‘read’ the photo, my gaze wandered downward and I was shocked to see that I had missed the most important detail — an older man, much the worse for wear, sleeping amid alleyway trash.”
“Yes, I felt embarrassed by my seeing him so late as I was focusing on other elements,” Mooney continued. “But perhaps that was the photographer/artist’s intention – making us confront our own failure to ‘see’ the sadness and neediness in our midst. I’m a wiser (and more chagrined) person for that experience, and isn’t that what art is supposed to do for us?”
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