Last Saturday, the Center for Photographic Art (CPA) in Carmel unveiled a new juried exhibition that differs from all its previous juror-selected art shows in that it only displays submissions by CPA members.
By joining the CPA and supporting its mission to promote “a broader understanding of photography’s powerful impact,” members were given the opportunity to provide their own photos for CPA’s website. Then came this members-only exhibition. Judging by the sheer amount and quality of the artwork, the members rose to the occasion. Magnificently.
Weston Gallery Art Director Richard Gadd, the show’s juror, hand-picked the 45 pieces from 630 submissions. “I wanted to show a cross-section of variety,” he says. “There had to be a uniqueness to the images.”
No two images are the same, but there are very few that look even remotely similar. So what connects all of them? “Familiar,” Gadd says, “but with a twist.”
There is indeed much familiarity in the photographs that line the white walls. Many tell clear stories: an icy landscape here, a demurely smiling portrait there. But others are almost abstract in their composition. One black-and-white image displays a series of straight lines, with two in the middle bent at obtuse angles. Are they trees? Pipes?
The exhibition is split about 60-40 between color and black-and-white. A handful are black-and-white silver gelatin prints. They’re softer and looser than the digitals, but still precise in their own way.
The silver gelatin development process, an old-fashioned technique dating back to the 1870s, gives the black and white more contrast and the gray more depth. Dawnelle Ward-Loveless, an exhibiting silver-gelatin artist, expresses a fondness for it. “I always go back to the darkroom,” she says.
The digital images vary drastically in color, subject and style, from realistic to abstract to seemingly painted. Exhibiting artist Tracy Valleau earned a place in the show with a digital color image that ranks among the abstracts. It looks like an upside-down, backwards L, overgrown with brittle brown vines. He shows me the subject: a business-card-sized square of watercolor paper with two miniscule inked lines. He snapped it, then blew it up so the areas where the ink bleeds thin lines into the paper were clearly visible.
“My wife had some artwork on the table. It was late afternoon, when the light cast a long, dark shadow on the floor,” he says of the image’s origin. “I thought, ‘Why can’t I do that?’”
The process may describe the subconscious goal of all these artists: to create beautiful and unusual work that carries different meanings for each person. To be familiar, with a twist.
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