111.76h x 140.97w cm
The Page Bond Gallery is pleased to present Anatomy of Trees: Photographs by William Wylie, Friday, January 22, 2016 from 6 to 8 PM. The exhibition will run January 22 to February 27, 2016.
American photographer William Wylie is best known for his restrained, black and white photographs of prairies, rivers, and forgotten midwestern towns. Driven by an interest in the “concept of Place,” Wylie’s landscapes capture more than geographical locations: they dig beneath the surface to investigate “spatial practice,” which the artist describes as “our consumption of space and our movement through it.” As with most landscapes, the human body is often physically excluded from Wylie’s photographs; yet subtle clues—tire tracks, ropes, distant telephone poles—indicate the presence of humankind and draw attention to the ways in which we perceive, interact with, and shape the landscape over time.
In his latest series, Wylie concentrates his study of spatial practice on trees he has encountered in two contrasting regions of the world: the western plains of Colorado and the Amalfi Coast in Italy. While the flat, desolate plains in the western state evince droughts and human abandonment, the images from Italy show an abundant, lush landscape that has been preserved for almost two decades as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Wylie uses his camera to capture these differences, but he does so impartially, portraying the trees from both sites with the same elegance and attention to detail. In so doing, he suggests that beauty and insight can be found anywhere, in growth as well as decay.
Using direct perspective and carefully balanced lighting, Wylie seeks to uncover “the grandeur of individual trees; the way they command a landscape and occupy space, their fullness and design, the way they hold light and are animated by weather and, of course, their character.” By focusing on such evocative details, he draws viewers’ attention to that which is often overlooked or unacknowledged, ultimately offering us a medium through which to think critically about our habits of perceiving and consuming the environment. By portraying trees with dignity and purpose, Wylie’s photographs suggest that everything in nature—no matter how undemanding it may seem—has a story worth knowing.
VIEW FIND: GROUP EXHIBITION OF PHOTOGRAPHY AT THE PAGE BOND GALLERY FRIDAY, JANUARY 22, 2016.
The Page Bond Gallery is pleased to present View Find: A Group Exhibition of Photography featuring work by
Mary Ellen Bartley, Jennifer Eason, Elijah Gowin, Emmet Gowin, Cynthia Henebry, Michael Lease, Amanda Means, Hullihen Moore, Fiona Ross, and Nicholas Seitz, Friday, January 22, 2016 from 6 to 8 PM. The exhibition will run January 22 to February 27, 2016.
Mary Ellen Bartley is an American artist whose photographs explore the tactile and formal qualities of the printed book and its potential for abstraction. Her Paperbacks is a series of muted, minimal images of stacked books in various arrangements–with the pages always viewed from the side, base or top so that no cover art is visible. Displayed in this equalizing way, the viewer is made aware of their materiality, and the books suggest building blocks in neutral tones. In their myriad shades of white, the paperbacks appear the same but different–Bartley simultaneously accentuates their unity and individuality. The “calm palette” she discovered in the stacks of paperbacks “further tranquilizes the clamor of narratives, characters and action that must be contained within their pages.” Bartley is interested in the “changing role of the book at this time. As information is stored in tinier and tinier digital forms the analog book seems to be moving into a realm of preciousness.” By emphasizing the books’ formal, tactile qualities, Bartley alters the viewer’s perception of their function and value.
Elijah Gowin’s photography comments on ritual, landscape, and memory. For his newest series, Slide Decay, he combines two outdated and obsolete image technologies–color slide transparencies and Cyanotype blue printing. The 19th-century process of blueprint, originally used for low-budget duplication of drawings and biological specimens, recalls “preservation, history and holding time.” By placing old, salvaged slides directly onto the light-sensitive surface, he creates layered and unique sun prints. In a culture that increasingly values the digital and instantaneous, Slide Decay celebrates low-tech and analog. Time is a component of both the Cyanotype and the slide transparency: considerable time is required to make, print, and view an image in these processes, which sets them apart from the digital. Gowin creates an orderly grid out of the jumble of slides; in this way, discarded objects become a thing of beauty. They no longer hold any value as a technology, but Gowin asserts their formal traits: they take on an architectural quality, stacked and layered like blocks unified by the deep blue tones of the Cyanotype process.
