June and July 2008
Above and Beyond
Second Saturday Receptions: June 14 and July 12, 2008 from 5:00 to 9:00 PM.
Robin Bartholick
“(O)ne might think that Robin Bartholick was born in the wrong century. In this world, men still wear homburgs and bowler hats. Women are still seen with petticoats and parasols. Circuses are still the greatest shows on earth.
His subjects seem about as grounded in old-fashioned reality as can be — until you notice that most of them are doing impossible things in unreal dreamscapes.
Bartholick’s early-20th-century look, however, comes from cutting-edge, 21st-century technology, such as Photoshop and the Canon EOS-1Ds digital camera. Each photo is painstakingly assembled from several other images, manipulated digitally and then stitched together to create a believable tableau of often-unbelievable scenarios.
“I worked on them like a painter, dealing with the proper perspective, getting the right lighting,” . . . (for the) black-and-white images, which sometimes require several days to complete. “One of the hardest things is keeping the light even for all the various elements.” -Randy Woods, PhotoMedia Magazine
August and September 2008
Antarctic Seascapes
Second Saturday Receptions: August 9 and September 13, 2008 from 5:00 to 9:00 PM.
Larry Brenden
October and November 2008
Nightblooms
Second Saturday Receptions: October 11 and November 8, 2008 from 5:00 to 9:00 PM.
Mark McAfee Brown
NIGHTBLOOMS are a series of digital art works that explore the space in which Nature and Technology collide, merge, marry and multiply. These are conceptual artworks in which I re-imagine, re-assemble and re-image the natural world, in a new visual world order. Nature newly unnatural - familiar yet unknown. These images are concerned much more with form, shape, allegory, visual and anthropomorphic relationships, composition and the emotional range of color than they are with flowers in a botanical sense, although without flowers none of them ever would have been made. They have a distant artistic antecedent in the works of Jan Brueghel the elder, who loved to paint flowers against a black background. They are more akin to paintings than to photographs.
These works are filled with time, seasons, forms, saturated colors and deep black space. From my garden I harvest what is blooming, budding, dying, colored, textured, warped or wonderful – depending on pre-conceived ideas for an image or natural inspiration. I scan these flowers, fruits, plants and vegetables using a flatbed scanner until I have the image or portions of an image that I want. In these works I use the scanner as a camera, shooting each “picture“ from below. Flowers are placed on top of the scanner with the scanner lid left open. I do a large number of scans until I have all of the picture elements I need for an image, depending on what the image, emotion and notion require to bring the picture to life. I then compose the images using Adobe Photoshop, a high-end image manipulation software program. Photoshop enables me to alter an image’s colors, saturation levels, brightness, contrast, texture, sharpness, clarity, obscurity and almost anything else. If I can imagine and scan something, I can create, manipulate and image it. I remake and refine these images until they are done, at which point I print them on a high resolution, eight color archival photo printer. They can be printed at very large sizes without losing resolution or sharpness. I am surprised and delighted by the promise and potential of this disparate mix of mediums; (high-tech/grow-tech/no-tech) and it is a rare treat indeed to have one’s studio and computer system filled with the sweet and heady scent of freshly cut flowers.
December 2008
Second Saturday Receptions: December 13, 2008 from 5:00 to 9:00 PM.
Darren Saravis