Marjorie Wood Gallery is pleased to present a suite of pictures by Rita Cihlar Hermann, Out of Ordinary. These pictures are a quiet celebration, an honoring, of ordinary people and places–the places overlooked or dismissed, where lives go unexamined. Folks are centered on living life, often unaware of how remarkable “common” is. Out of these ordinary people and places, Rita sees emblems of our humanity, rituals that bestow community on us, individual complexity and the simplicity of our connections. Feeding the need to make a verifying, and terrifying, and healing, connection to the genuine, Rita reveals the magical and profoundly democratic value of photography.
Rita thinks road trips heal the soul. She grew up in the Midwest and left home at age 18 in a 1968 Ford Falcon her mother gave her that broke down right before she dropped out of college. After that her various road trips were conducted via a Chevy pickup truck named Tuna that threw a rod in a Nebraska intersection, a Volkswagen hatchback that leaked gas into the engine block so badly it never had a chance to be named, a Volkswagen Bug named Dub with the floor boards rusting out so water splashed up on the front seat passenger, a Honda Civic named Nerd Car that was hit head on by a wrong-way driver on a California freeway in the pouring rain late for class, a Toyota Tercel named Hank that we drove to Niagara Falls and watched fireworks from stuck in a 4th of July traffic jam, a Geo Metro named Speck that was hit by a deer outside Santa Cruz and blew the air bags, and a Ford Windstar van named The Magic Wagon was bought for a song in Storm Lake, Iowa but the side door falls off if you aren’t careful.
