Gallery Report
I visited a gallery which featured the works of many artists on a single
topic. The topic, “What is a Photograph?”,
talked about exploring the experimentation in photography that has occurred
since the 1970s. The gallery puts together artists that, through their use of
light, color, composition and outside materials, have questioned people’s
definition of the genre.
The exhibition was held at the International Centre of Photography at 6th
Avenue. The exhibition was shown on at the bottom floor of the gallery and had
5 well lit rooms which held works from 2 of each artist featured in the
exhibition in certain rooms and depending on the size of their pieces, the
number of work shown in each room was somewhere between 3 to 6. But because of
the large number of artist featured in this gallery, I have chosen three artists
that I will focus on in this review. The reason that Io have chosen these three
artists over the others because of their use of colors and ways they have used
the medium stood out over the rest.
James Welling, born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1951, attended the
California Institute of during the 1970s where he studied conceptualism and
other contemporary artistic practices. During this time, he had also taught
himself photography and the history of the medium. His subjects vary but often
included architecture, landscape, memory, and basic elements such as light and
shadow and color. A lot of the works featured in this gallery are part of a
series of color studies called Degradés. They were produced by shading a piece
of chromatic paper with a piece of cardboard or foam core, exposing one-half of
the paper to a specific color, then doing the same on the other half of
paper. The composition in his works are
very well thought out and with the unique combination of warm and cool colors
conveys sense of a peaceful emotion and a warm home-like feeling.
Alison Rossiter, born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1953, uses expired,
unexposed photographic materials she purchased on eBay to explore new
image-making possibilities. At first, her plan was to use the sheets she bought
to make photograms that pay homage to the marked notches in the upper right
corner of the film but when she started to develop the paper, the image came
out something similar to an abstract drawing because of the chemical changes
the sheets had gone through over time. Her pieces are very unique as still give
off the feeling like she planned where the chemicals will hit, how long she
would develop each sheet and how would it affect the composition. And because of how long she would develop each
sheet; her work would give off this feeling off light fading off the page.
Travess Smalley, born in Huntington, West Virginia in 1986, creates
cameraless collage prints with the use of a scanner, colored paper, magazine
pages, drawings, scissors, and Photoshop. His works are created by scanning and
rescanning his compositions, zooming into color fields to alter dot patters,
pixels, and moiré patterns, working with a copy of a copy in a continuing
feedback loop and using the “dialogue” between the digital and the physical to
build a composition. His pieces have great composition; keeping in mind of the
negative space. The way he puts together his collages, gives his pieces a
hidden image and the colors have a psychedelic feeling.
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