Lanesboro Arts presents “Reflections,” a photography exhibit by Rhea Pappas of underwater pictures. The exhibit opens with an artist reception on Saturday, April 14, 2018, from 6-8 p.m., and runs through June 17, 2018. The reception will include wine and hors d’oeuvres, as well as live music. Always free and open to the public, the Lanesboro Arts Gallery is open seven days a week.

Rhea Pappas is a 29 year old, female photographer working out of Saint Paul, Minnesota. Her work mainly focuses in emotion, relief, and womanhood within water. Growing up in Golden Valley, Minnesota and spending most her life sailing, traveling, and exploring the world with her family has brought this love and focus in water as a form of expression. Her earlier twenties brought some chaos to her life with post traumatic stress, depression, memory loss, and a cervical cancer scare that brought her urge to photograph a sense of relief, calmness, and inner strength unavoidable. Photographing this way gave her the feelings she desired and missed in her own life and was a silent cry for the calmness and inner peace within her photographs. She photographed the the world she desired to live in.

Since she was a small child, Pappas grew up sailing with her father throughout all of the Great Lakes and even journeyed from Florida up the Atlantic coastline. When she was 16, her dad would let her take complete control of the boat when he needed to rest for the night. Pappas realizes, “This was when I became an adult. It was a moment of empowerment.”

Later in life, when she was deciding between Marine Biology or Photography, because of her sailing experience, she told herself, “anything I put my mind to, I could handle.” She has since become an accomplished photographer with exhibitions in France, New York, Vermont and Minnesota and has aspirations of taking photos and exhibiting on the coasts. Pappas’ work captures a sense of liberation and escape from reality through underwater photography of women.

This body of work was about exploring the water and playing with it’s natural properties as home, safety, and womenly. I liked to talk about the idea of entering, living, and escaping away in the water. Away from the world, away from others, where one can be alone.

“When I have people look at my art, I want them to experience something. Not quite cinematic, but I want there to be an experience, a narrative, an enlightenment, even possibly something that inspires them to look at something or feel something different. What art is, is simple. It is what the viewer thinks it is.”

This exhibit is sponsored by Commonweal Theatre and made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. For more information visit www.lanesboroarts.org, call 507-467-2446 or email gallery@lanesboroarts.org. Handicapped accessible and free to the public, the exhibition gallery is located at 103 Parkway Avenue North in Lanesboro.