"Sun Pictures to MegaPixels: Archaic Processes to Alternative Realities (Pre-and Post-Modernist Photography)"
Indepth Arts News:
http://www.absolutearts.com/artsnews/2007/09/27/34688.html
“Sun Pictures to MegaPixels: Archaic Processes to Alternative Realities (Pre-and Post-Modernist Photography)”
2007-09-29 until 2007-11-04
Williamsburg Art and Historical Center
Brooklyn, NY, USA United States of America
absolutearts.com artists, Ellen Jantzen and Brad Michael Moore, will exhibit work beginning Saturday, September 29th and continuing through November 4th, 2007 in the exhibition titled: “Sun Pictures to MegaPixels: Archaic Processes to Alternative Realities (Pre-and Post-Modernist Photography),” at the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center, 135 Broadway, Brooklyn, New York 11211. Opening is 4 to 6 pm September 29,2007 and, also, there will be a Costume Ball for the Opening Night’s festivities – along with a special performance – “Photonic Sculptural Movement.”
Statement by Joel Simpson, Curator
“Why put archaic process photography together with digital photography in the same show? It’s because they each subvert one of the central tenants of photographic modernism: the transparency of the medium, and the truthfulness of the image. Archaic process photographers, with their chemical signatures, compromise transparency, while digital process photographers, as they elaborate the plausible impossibilities of their vision, abandon literal veracity.
“This makes archaic process photography as a kind of expressionism: the visibility of the chemical medium imparts an emotional perspective to the subject. Digital process photographers, on the other hand, drawing their inspiration from the imaginative freedom of the surrealists (as do commercial photographers, though in a more circumscribed way), use their freedom to create fantasy worlds, dreamscapes, as extravagant as those of Dali, Ernst, or Magritte. Both are represented masterfully and with great originality in the show.” – Joel Simpson
Joel Simpson has been photographing since 1960 through careers in academia (teaching college English, French and Italian) and jazz piano. He produced the Dick Hyman Century of Jazz Piano CD-ROM in 1999, while living in New Orleans. After returning to the New York area in 2000, he began writing art criticism and showing his fine art photography in area galleries beginning in 2002. The Sun Pictures to Mega-Pixels show was conceived following the success of Brave Destiny a major exhibition of surrealist art at the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center in 2003. Simpson began working on the show in 2004. After many bureaucratic delays and by virtue of the persistence of the small community of photographic artists in the show, it is finally coming to fruition.
Joel Simpson was assisted by curator by Ellen Carey, Associate Professor of Photography, Hartford Art School, University of Hartford.
Brad Michael Moore states about his work:
My “MultiPlexing,” represents a process of mirroring and unfolding an image to observe its hidden symmetrical qualities. I apply the process to a wide range of subjects, transforming simpler random forms them into new structures of balance and symmetry, revealing new meanings. Sometimes I destabilize the process via additive visual notions that slightly skew the image equilibrium. I began practicing the MultiPlexing art form piecemeal (by the panel) in the darkroom – a very laborious exercise. Digital process makes things much easier. This work, perhaps seeded from Op Art, seeks to be more than a Rorschach Test, more than a wallpaper. I search, through the mind-friendly medium of repetition, to uncover formal beauty in an external world of randomness.
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