Artists talk about Chicago Project on Edelman Gallery website

I brought my two prints home from recently from The Chicago Project V exhibit that has been on display at the Catherine Edelman Gallery since early July. However, the exhibit lives on in the words of the artists (including mine) on the gallery website. Each of the nine artists included in the exhibit were interviewed for a feature called Artist Talk.

The purpose of Artist Talk, according to the website, is to further the understanding of "the creative process through the words of the photographer. We hope collectors, curators and the general public will gain a better understanding about each piece on exhibit and the artist in general."

Before the interview we were prepped to include some biographical information, who influenced our work and/or other photographers we admire, and then to describe the prints on display in some detail. If you listen to my video you will note that I adhere pretty much to this pattern. The two prints that represent me in the exhibit are from my Synecdoche Series (and, yes, I explain that odd term in the video!) You can hear just my interview, or any of the other individual photographers, by clicking here and then clicking on the small video link to the right of my name under my two prints.

To listen to all of the interviews in a sequence, you can click here and then click on the link to "The Chicago Project V," (which is currently right on top.)

To read my previous post about the The Chicago Project V exhibit, click here.

My Synecdoche Series has been complete enough to have been exhibited twice now in solo shows. However, wherever I travel I continue to find subjects that are consistent with its theme of symbolizing the fragments of nature that represent the whole. Sometimes they even push the concept in a new direction. I recently returned from a vacation trip to Cape Ann, north of Boston. A familiar landmark there is the twin lighthouses on Thatcher Island, the kind of place where our species has been testing its relationship with the natural world for a very long time.

Fortuitously, I was there when the moon was full.

You can also see more from the Synecdoche Series on my website.

What is Synecdoche? My photo exhibit at BBFA

Transmission

First, mark your calendar: my upcoming solo show, entitled Synecdoche: The Fragment that Represents the Whole, runs from March 15 - 30 at Blutstein Brondino Fine Art, which is in Suite 212 of the Marshall Building at 207 E. Buffalo St., Milwaukee, WI. (Gallery hours listed below.)

Second, mark your calendar again: the reception is on March 22, 5-8 pm.

So, with that out of the way, let's tackle this funny title: Synecdoche.

Synecdoche is a literary device in which the part represents the whole. ("All hands on deck!" refers to the whole sailor, not just the hands.) My images are meant to be visual examples of synecdoche, which I use metaphorically. My subjects are the complex and often paradoxical relationships that I perceive between nature and architecture, or natural and human features in the landscape. My approach, using the part to represent the whole, symbolizes the fragmentation we experience in our everyday environment.

Live Oaks

How do we reconstruct a definition of nature at a time when our traditional understanding has eroded and nature seems increasingly reduced, manufactured and abstracted? How does being human relate to our notions about nature? These are not landscapes in the usual sense, but symbols of how we construct meaning and interpret our place in a fast-changing world.

For additional examples from my Synecdoche Series check out my website.

Gallery hours: Friday 9 a.m. - 5 p.m., Saturday 11 a.m. - 4 p.m., and by appointment.
 

Images of Atlanta

Last week I posted a review of the SPE conference in Atlanta. Here is a different kind of review: a visual meditation on "civilization."

There was a time when there was no division between the natural world and the human world, when there was no concept of “wilderness” because the undifferentiated world was simply where we lived as a species, among others. Civilization changed that. When humans became civilized, nature became “other” and untamed nature became wilderness. Now, after millennia of the inexorable civilization of the wilderness, precious little of it remains. By the end of the twentieth century it became possible to contemplate what Bill McKibben termed “the end of nature,” a global environment so totally compromised by human activities that no place remains untouched, no landscape remains pristine, no environment unaltered.

Today, most people live in densely populated cities, where nature is reduced to bits and pieces, if not bulldozed into oblivion and replaced with symbols. Parks and lawns represent what has been lost. Trees dwarfed by architecture symbolize the great primeval forests. But we must have our symbols, lest we lose our souls. The bits and pieces must not simply represent but embody the whole. Nature cannot be denied. When we chose civilization over wilderness we began a long gradual process of alienation from the soil, plants, and animals, as well as the natural processes that we once knew as instinctively as a Monarch knows how to get to one mountainside in Mexico. But we did not and cannot separate ourselves from our own natures.

When I went to Atlanta for a conference recently I found myself in a wholly “civilized” environment. My need for a connection with nature was not appeased by the tenuous indoor approximation provided by the conference hotel: the tepid, chlorinated atmosphere of its atrium with an undulating pool and potted tropical trees. Although others found it relaxing, I needed to be outdoors. But, with little time and no transportation, I was trapped downtown in a citadel of skyscrapers. There being no wilderness, urban or otherwise, within reach, I sought out bits and pieces, the symbols of nature that we plant between sidewalks and streets, in tiny public plazas, and even tinier window boxes.

We have spent millennia casting out the wilderness, trying to create a safe, orderly environment. As a consequence the world has become abstract, geometric, civilized. And so I offer this small sampling of images, of nature abstracted, fragmented, distilled into minute traces. We are capable of creating a world that looks like this, but is it the world we want to live in? The problem with the “end of nature” is that it is based on a false premise, the false dichotomy: we humans are not – and never have been – separate from nature. We have tried to tame it – perhaps too successfully – but nature includes us. We cannot escape from our own nature. Whatever environment we create, that is where we must live. When the wilderness has been completely tamed and the world once again is undifferentiated, will it look like this?

To see more images from this series, go to my flickr page.

To read my post about the conference I attended, go to Science, Poetry, and the Photographic Image.