NYC Architectural Abstraction

Back in November I had the opportunity to go to NYC with several fellow students and our printmaking professor. For those of you who dont know, I love NYC. I will admit that I am a tourist...looking at the buildings, watching people, etc. For someone who grew up on the prairies and loves watching the light drift lazily over fields, trees, and elevators I think that my love of line and hard edges find its source in NYC more than any other city. I love how light moves over, around, reflects, in perpetually changing angles and intensity. I marvel at the architecture itself, but also the interplay between one building and another especially in the mornings when light begins to scrape over and flit through the gaps between the buildings.

I've posted just a simple four shots of my favorites. Enjoy.

Show in Montana

I am excited to mention that I've had 3 photographs selected for the 31st Annual Southeastern Montana Juried Exhibit at the Custer County Art and Heritage Center in Miles City, Montana. The work is from the Elevator Series from this past fall. Two of the selected works can be seen under the October 23rd posting. I will be exhibiting along side of several of UND's faculty (Wes Smith, Lucy Ganje, Patrick Luber, and Don Miller).

Elevator Series

The semester is drawing towards a close, as you might have inferred from the lack of recent posting here at AOA. Next week I will be turning in 30+ 17x11 images of the Elevators Series. For the most part, I've been really happy with this project and look forward to picking it up again in next spring and summer when the North Dakota temperatures allow.

Prairie Abstractions: A Preliminary Artist Statement

This semester as part of my photography credits I am being asked to work on my artists statements. I must work through 3 drafts, the last of which is turned in with the final 30 images at the conclusion of the semester.

For someone who likes to write, artist statements do not come easily. I think I tend to default to my theological writing style that many just find arduous and technical. This recent attempt at commenting on the Elevator Series, seemed to emerge a little more poetically this time. Take a quick read. I would love any thoughts on it.

"As child growing up among the fertile soils of Iowa farmland, grain elevators were a frequent sight and destination. In a land known for flatness, these vertical edifices become a towns’ most prominent and recognizable architecture. They tower above the trees and cast far reaching shadows at the extremities of the day. In the fall, they become the swollen bellied depositories of the regions hard work and financial hopes. Here I would wait with my father in the train-like lines of tractors and wagons. In other seasons, as I passed through this busy hub on my bicycle, I would dodge its deep potholes worn into the pummeled ground by the over-loaded traffic.

While my recollections of these times and places are fragmentary, they still loom as large as the elevators themselves in my memory and imagination. This series is, in a sense, a return “home.” Not only to similar places that evoke long stored and now partial memories, it is a return to a first love of black and white photography. This pilgrimage of memory and method allows a continuation of work in regional architecture and geometric abstraction.

These images follow a long lineage of abstraction, particularly found in the modernist photographer and painter Charles Sheeler. They allow the bucolic and vernacular architecture to be continually transformed by the play of light and shadow that daily creep over and around the corrugated angles and lines.

This body of work attempts to push back on the tendency within photography to emphasize indexicality and objective realism while still conveying an accuracy of representation. Viewers are challenged to see beyond the literal reality into the fractured structural form and overall composition."

Elevator Series

I've not made posting a priority lately but I shot some fun shots in this ongoing elevator series over last weekend. We've been gone to Minneapolis and Sioux Falls over the last 2 weekends to see friends and such. My weeks have been condensed down into about 3.5 days of actual time so blogging has not been a priority.

Days like last Sunday in the fall and spring in ND are rare...no wind and bright sun. So under these perfect conditions I was able to get a few quality shots for the series. I feel these two are among the best thus far for the series.

One of the struggles being an interdisciplinary person as I am is staying active in both fields. Most of my time here at UND has been focussed on art (as it should) though I do try to maintain a small connection into the theological conferences and even postings here. Over the past year I have had quite a few opportunities to show across ND, SD, NJ and even S. Africa. I did find a potential show for these elevator prints called Positive/Negative. You never know what will come with juried shows. So much depends upon the chosen juror and their interpretation of the theme, their likes/dislikes, and probably their mood the day they look at all the submissions. Artists are jokingly referred to as "starving artists" likely because to enter 3 pieces in a show like this costs about 30 or 35$, plus framing costs, and of course round-trip shipping all for one line on your CV. My pessimism aside, it it quite fun to get the email or letter that something of yours was chosen to be shown. Here's to hoping...

Charles Sheeler's Photography

This semester is slipping by all too quickly and I have failed to keep up with my writing here.  My hope had been to do a series on the work of Sheeler as a source of inspiration for my recent elevator series.  Its now 2/3 of the way through September and I have yet to draw those connections.

Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) is known more for his painting as a key member of the precisionist school than for his photography.  That being said, for a short time, Sheeler was the leading photographer in the United States and perhaps even beyond.  In 1913 Sheeler exhibited 6 new paintings in the Armory show and about the same time, Sheeler picked up the camera to make ends meet shooting architecture around the Northeast.  In 1915 Sheeler's photography moved forward into abstraction with the photograph Side of White Barn (seen below).  Sheeler now sought to merge photography's realism or indexicality with Modernity's drive toward abstraction.  His goal was to show that the basic elements in Modern art, particularly cubism, existed within nature.  

Sheeler also employs another key to Modern art, that of flatness.  Through photography, Sheeler is able to explore real depth and the flatness of the actual image through light, shadow, line, form and the overall composition.  What emerges in his work is a bold geometry and structure of the American industrial ediface.  The first image is of the Ford Plant and the second graces the cover of the book I read this summer...certainly the finest coverage of Sheeler's photographic work.

Elevator Series

This past weekend I made my way down to South Dakota to see friends and on to the homeland of Iowa to visit my family at Marble Beach for a weekend of camping.  Along the way down and back I made numerous stops to continue working on the elevator series.  The two posted here are from a fortuitous detour through Ocheyeden Iowa.

These similar shots, while of the same subject and angle work differently.  The top image is much is more tightly cropped and flattens the subject more than the second which takes in more shadow and variety of planes and tonal fields.  

Preferences?

North Dakota Elevator Series

As I've noted several times recently, my fall work will further explore photographic and architectural abstraction of a particular kind of building...the grain elevator.  This is in one sense is an expansion and narrowing of my previous work.

The work will narrow my focus on one form of architecture but will simultaneously expand from the flat formal shots of the Threshold series to include angles, as well as the black and white photograph itself from the previous color work.  

By relying upon black and white, I feel like I am able to push the natural abstraction of the architectures angles, shadows and light as they pass over varieties of tin and other metals.  Though our goals are different, I feel like I am working more in the tradition of Lewis Baltz and perhaps even more towards Charles Sheeler.  I hope to do a little more comparison to Sheeler in the coming weeks.

Architectural Abstraction

Last year I began to notice a trend in my photography...one of abstraction. Last year I began the Threshold Series, of which I posted on quite often last year. Over the summer I started thinking about looking at a particular kind of structure. Growing up in the Midwest, it is hard not to have had some connection to the many grain elevators sprinkled across the region. My hope is to begin a series of photographs that look at these historic agricultural facades in a slightly different way...less as a landscape and more as a tightly focused work abstracting the buildings geometry highlighted by shadow and light falling across its angles and planes.

The first image is reminiscent of the Threshold Series. However, the second image is more like the series I am envisioning for this fall. In part, I think this series is partially indebted to some of my summer reading on the precisionist Charles Sheeler. Watch for more to come on this project and its connection to Sheeler.