Spotlight: 2013 Pacific NW Photography Viewing Drawers (round 5)
Hello, Blue Sky Blog Readers, Happy November! Can you believe we're already halfway through our 2013 Pacific Northwest Photography Viewing Drawers SPOTLIGHT (review rounds one, two, three, and four) — have you been keeping track of your favorites?
We’ll continue to preview 10 Drawers artists every week through Thanksgiving (aka: the beginning of holiday gift shopping season). Yes, all the prints in the Drawers are for sale! Email Amanda Clem at amandaclem@blueskygallery.org or call (503) 225-0210 to inquire about prices and availability. Better yet, come to the gallery and take some time to look at the prints in person.
Blue Sky established the Pacific Northwest Photography Viewing Drawers program in 2007 to feature a juried, public archive of original prints by contemporary photographers based in the region. Our Drawers program has quickly become a favorite aspect of Blue Sky’s ongoing programming, available to approximately 25,000 visitors annually. For 2012—to coincide with the newly inaugurated Portland Photo Month (every April)—Blue Sky expanded the geographic scope of the Drawers program to include photographers from Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, British Columbia, and Alaska.
This week, let's take a peek at:
Stuart McCall, Delta, British Columbia, Canada
Artist Statement: Discontinuous Spectrums — This series of photographs examines the peculiar, unworldly lighting currently favored for industrial and security purposes. Lighting selected strictly for the purpose of providing maximum illumination at the lowest cost. The images show the exteriors of mostly industrial locations, photographed at night or at dusk. Sometimes the entire night sky is illuminated by light spill. These lights, known as discontinuous spectrum sources, produce light by the reaction of electrical energy passing through particular gasses. The end product, a type of illumination that does not occur naturally in this world, creates a type of light in which entire sections of the visual spectrum are missing. Sodium Vapor lacks blues and greens; Metal Halide is lacking much of the red spectrum, etc. The photographs were created primarily using digital imaging equipment, although the colors and compositions have not been manipulated except for minor adjustments that would normally be conducted in the conventional chemical based photographic process.
From $1,500
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Robbie McClaran, Portland, OR
Artist Statement: Submitted images are a selection from an ongoing personal documentary project on the American heartland. I use the term personal documentary, as the project serves as a visual diary of my interactions with the people and landscape I discover. My aim is to portray moments of grace and beauty found along back streets unseen by most travelers and that collectively these photographs will tell a story of contemporary America at a time of great upheaval and change.
From $400
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George Olson, Beaverton, OR
Artist Statement: I’ve been fascinated by, and drawn to France since I was a teenager, but only when I was an adult did I travel there with a camera. Then, I felt like I had to make up for lost time, surrounded as I was by buildings older than anything I’d ever seen, people I admired, but struggled to understand, and customs and even cars all new to me. My first trip was for an art workshop, but I shot 40 rolls of Tri-X with one Leica, and I knew my heart was won over. After that, I was drawn back again and again to one small town in Provence called Biot, where I came to know all the winding cobbled streets, and many of the people. I became comfortable there, learned the language, and quietly observed their world. Other trips were to Paris, either by myself, or staying with a French friend. Until 2002, I’d never been to France in the spring or summer, but I found the fall and winter months beautiful and challenging. One chilly day, I walked and zigzagged every bridge over the Seine, which I bet few Parisians have done. I’m struck by how much some of the pictures look as if they are from another era - change in France is not as dramatic as it is in the U. S. The French hold to tradition, ancient crafts, and see the old as something to be maintained not replaced. A Christmas picture with a 1930’s car is normal. An elderly woman walking past a castle is “today.” Faded window lettering still announces a teashop. And yet, they’re all from my many experiences in the past 30 years. It seems natural to have captured these experiences in black and white. To me it enhances the timelessness, the history, the style, and even the peculiarities of France.
From $200
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Robert Pallesen, Portland, OR
Artist Statement: I am interested in what photographs say about us and our culture and the uncertain territories between cities and towns. I photograph areas where the industrial, commercial and residential border one another. Most of the images were created close to my home in Portland. The images investigate the transient nature of the landscape and our relationship with it.
From $150
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Stepanka Peterka, Portland, OR
Artist Statement: Relating to an Orbit — It is believed that at approximately 28-30 years of age, a person experiences an astrological phenomenon known as Saturn Return. As a distant planet, Saturn takes approximately 2.5 years to traverse one sign and 29 years to complete a cycle around the sun and entire zodiac, returning to the same position it occupied at a person’s birth, constituting a full orbit. This cyclical phase of ‘return’ is ostensibly marked by intensity, transformation, and chronological stress: the process of self-discovery and a sense of seizing truth. At 29 and affected by some incredible impulse of self-inquiry, I am inspired to explore some of the obscure ideas behind the alleged Saturn Return through the prism of art. A key concept held by astrologers is that a person crosses over a major threshold and enters a new stage of life, which involves evaluating foundations of self-awareness. A personal foundation of self-awareness is former Czechoslovakia, where I was absorbed for much of my life because of a Czech father. By coinciding intervals, or ‘returns’ to Czech Republic, with Saturn returning in my constellation, this ongoing work contemplates the past as a gateway to the present moment. It regards our sensitivity arise from a desire to establish meaning for the Self. Under the influence, it is ultimately an experience of time, archetypes and inspiration to belief systems that deeply subjective.
From $500
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Alexis Pike, Bozeman, MT
Artist Statement: This body of work is inspired by the book We Sagebrush Folks, a memoir written by Annie Pike Greenwood, detailing her time spent in an early Southern Idaho farming community from 1906-1928. The Greenwoods, along with other families, migrated to Idaho because of the allure of the Carey Act of 1894, a land grant program to encourage settlement of federally owned arid lands, with the aid of irrigation. The Carey Act thrived on promotional propaganda, suggesting that fields of sagebrush could magically be transformed into irrigated Edens; it was a farmer’s gold rush-enticing dreamers to move to wilderness regions. Greenwood’s book explores these dreams of cultivation, the hope of prosperity, and the difficult reality of trying to harness a landscape to suit the needs of the farmer. The book is an eclectic personal journey, calling on Greenwood’s experiences as a mother, wife, and educator. To illustrate my journey of being inspired by her book, I have used her text as my map. One hundred years later, I’ve been retracing Annie’s steps, creating a photographic survey of the Snake River Plain where We Sagebrush Folks are still trying to turn the desert into a promised land.
From $400
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David Pollock, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Artist Statement: Fertile Geometry —I made these photographs between 2008 and 2010 in the farmlands of the Saanich Peninsula on Vancouver Island. Farming is often viewed through the lens of nostalgia and romanticized as a lost way of life that was more connected to nature. The farm fields were a fruitful way for me to situate the human in nature because it is within this interface that questions arise regarding our place in the natural world. As much as the idea of wilderness implies no human presence, these anthropogenic landscapes are reminders of our inescapable and constant interaction with the natural world. What first attracted me to this landscape was the quality of deep open space enclosed by distant hills. This dimension, combined with the linear traces of farming and boundaries, form the visual framework that supports this series. The word Geometry is derived from ancient Greek meaning ‘to measure the earth’ and the earliest application of geometry was to partition land. My point of view with the field pictures was topographical and, like a map, these photographs are a precise representation of surface that is both a record and an abstraction. As the seasons came and went, I made pictures that for the most part, are representations of transitional states of farmland. It was often, as I stood in the silence of the fields, that I looked at the black earth and understood that this was the skin of the earth upon which I stood. From this viewpoint, I began to see the surface of this landscape and the traces of farm work as indices of the human actions, which shape the land for food production. These landscapes are concerned with concepts of consumption, transformation, regeneration and the elemental. However, these pictures are also a vantage point from which to consider our dependence upon fertile soil and to see farming as the foundation upon which our societies are built and sustained.
From $800
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Douglas Prior, Portland, OR
Artist Statement: Photography is an adventure full of many surprises. I embrace these surprises, which leads me down challenging paths. Investigating the layers of my photographs is like exploring an energy or spirit beyond the physical world. Shapes are imbued with meaning.
From $150
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Christopher Rauschenberg, Portland, OR
Artist Statement: These images make up part one of my series Museum. Part two is about the rooms the art is in and part three is about people interacting with the art in these rooms. Though I think the story deepens with the added layers of the rooms and people, the art itself is the soul of the experience and with just ten images it seems best to let the artworks tell their own stories. In these images I treat the people in the artworks as if they were living sentient beings. This approach echoes that of my recent series Hold, and is a natural outgrowth of my series of 500 re-photographs of Atget’s Paris. The statues in Atget’s photographs are alive in a way that the Parisians themselves are not, as they rush about too hurriedly to more than occasionally even register on his film. Atget was interested in mankind, but he saw our beauty and glory in the things we do that outlive us, rather than in the briefer magic of Cartier-Bresson and Lee Friedlander’s decisive moments. My work is somehow a mixture of Atget and Friedlander, as I am fascinated by these centuries-old fleeting gestures.
From $800
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Mark Reid, Portland, OR
Artist Statement: I am an artist who uses photographs as a tool for reproducing the beauty I find in the world. From an early age I carried a camera to record my experiences, and to share them with others. My photographic career has always revolved around a process of recording images as my experience expanded. It is a continuous evolutionary process that has brought me to the floral images I am creating today. In my neighborhood in Portland, Oregon, I recently found several hibiscus petals lying on the sidewalk. I took these small pieces of nature into my studio and made images of them. Isolating these images from their natural environment allowed me to focus on details of their beauty. With the success of the hibiscus petals I began to collect more natural specimens and isolate them in the controlled environment of my studio. I discovered that even though these specimens are only a small piece of the original plant our minds recreate the association with the original plant and its environment. Like the order of a landscaped city park, our minds are attracted to organization and familiarity of a known environment. In contrast, a natural forest may seem visually chaotic or overwhelming. Similarly, our minds are attracted to imagery that we can recognize and identify. We can create a story about the hibiscus petals from our past experiences. The photograph is only a piece of the plant, but to our minds it makes sense, and in turn we interpret it to be a beautiful object. Thus, through subject matter, perspective, and presentation, I seek to find beauty.
From: $325
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As always, we invite you to come spend some time looking through the Drawers yourself during our open hours (Tuesday — Sunday, Noon to 5pm!)
See you soon,
Amanda
Membership & Gallery Manager