Reynolds Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Signs and Spirits of Lake Elster, a solo exhibition showcasing work by Will Connally. The exhibition opens on Tuesday, June 10, 2025 at our Main Street location. The show runs through August 22. There will be an artist talk & reception on Wednesday, July 30, from 5pm – 7pm.
Will Connally’s photographs are based on an elaborate narrative that emerges from the fictional Lake Elster, a rural north-eastern lake. To stage these photographs, he has developed a series of short stories, sketches, fabricated props, and a detailed timeline spanning over 370 years from the European discovery of the lake. The works purposefully disguise narrative elements, encouraging viewers to imagine the untold pieces.
Connally draws inspiration for the original Lake Elster Series from personal narratives, folklore, literature, film noir, and amateur theater productions. All elements of the scenes are photographed together in-camera on medium-format film, rather than collaged afterwards in post-production. The inclusion of flat, stage-like painted elements in each scene emphasizes the fictional nature of the narrative and calls into question the veracity of the photographs.
“Spoon Wall”, 2024 (left); “Torn Portrait (Fur Trapper’s Daughter)”, 2024 (right)
As the series has grown, Connally has photographed scenes set on Lake Elster on various bodies of fresh water across the United States, Canada, rural Finland, and most recently in western Ireland. While the story itself is set in a remote part of New Hampshire, Lake Elster has an odd, mythical quality in the photographs, where the proportions of the lake ebb and flow, mirroring the fictional narrative. Working in western Ireland this past summer, he was able to add a new sense of scale, color, and topography to the series. The photographs embrace the elusive, ever-changing quality of fiction, especially when retold by a narrator well into his nineties.
Step into the world of Signs and Spirits of Lake Elster. This show will take you on a journey through Connally’s exploration of narrative, storytelling, and portraiture surrounding the fictionalized Lake Elster and its residents. Connally’s photographs and installations absorb the viewer into his richly imagined surroundings through staged scenes replete with fabricated elements and symbolic objects. These images, eerie and absent of definitively formed figures, evoke the presence of characters who may never fully appear. As the viewer moves through the work, the line between history and hallucination grows increasingly blurred, creating a psychologically complex experience.
Each photograph is an environmental portrait of a Lake Elster resident, as recounted by unreliable narrator Wade Lagarde. Specific figures from his memory inhabit these scenes and can be traced throughout the series, from the brutal discovery of the lake by Jesuit priests and French fur-trappers in the 17th century (led by Father Seneschal Brulotte and Henri Babeurre), and the ensuing conflict with the native Abenaki Indians, through Alan Welter’s time in his basement workshop and adhesives factory in 1961, on to more contemporary times with the Wolframs and the introduction of Maeve Devlin, who recently happened upon Elster.
Significant objects in the photographs stand as attributes of characters who are often absent from the images. Stage-like, fabricated elements act as a rupture, heightening the subjective nature of the narrative. The original stories embedded in the images, as remembered by Wade, get further distorted with each new read.
– Will Connally, 2025
Will Connally received his MFA in Photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art and his BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. He was a resident at Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta, Canada, and was awarded a Professional Fellowship from The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. He has presented his work in exhibitions and artist lectures internationally, has artwork in the permanent collection of Cranbrook Art Museum, and was recently an artist in residence at Watershed Art Studios in Galway, Ireland and Arteles Creative Center in Hameenkyro, Finland. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Art Foundation Program at VCUarts.