Hard Ecology: a photo exhibit opening in July

I will have a solo show at the Tamarack Studio & Gallery in Madison, WI during July/August, 2013:

 

Hard Ecology: Rethinking Nature in an Abstract Landscape

Tamarack Studio & Gallery is at 849 E. Washington Avenue, Suite 102, in Madison. (Corner of E. Washington and Paterson.)

Opening reception Friday, July 19 from 5:30 to 8:30 pm.

This exhibit features an updated selection from my Synecdoche Series plus two 8-foot long murals. Morning Light (Menomonee Valley), below, is one of those.

Synecdoche refers to a literary device in which the part represents the whole. My work uses the concept as a metaphor; the images are visual examples of synecdoche. My subject is the complex—often paradoxical—relationships I see between nature and architecture/human culture. My approach, using the part to represent the whole, is to symbolize the fragmentation we experience in our everyday environment. 

The title of the exhibit, Hard Ecology: Rethinking Nature in an Abstract Landscape, comes from the title of my latest book, which is both a selection from the larger Synecdoche Series and a fine art book in prototype form. The book design is carefully sequenced and the image plates are complemented with graphics and text that are intended to expand on the metaphorical character and content of the images. The book is available to preview and purchase at MagCloud.

The following is excerpted from the text of the book:

We are in a time of reckoning. Understanding our place in the world that we have wrought will be a hard lesson in ecology. We have tamed the wilderness, shaped nature, tried to design it into submission. Nature has been transformed, reduced, and abstracted. Nature is increasingly compromised or redeemed by our own actions. But nature is not—never has been—separate from us, from what is human. We have always been part of nature, inseparable except in our own minds.

Ecology is the study of relationships in the natural world. There can be no complete understanding of ecology without knowing where the human fits into the web of life.

To see more images from the Synecdoche Series, go to my website.