THIS PHOTOGRAPHY SHOW IS PACKED WITH SOME BAY AREA GREATS AND I HIGHLY RECOMMEND YOU SEE IT!
March 15 – May 11, 2014
Artist Reception: Saturday, March 22, 6:00 – 8:00 pm
Berkeley Art Center1275 Walnut Street
Berkeley, CA, 94709P: 510.644.6893 phone
F: 510.644.0343
info@berkeleyartcenter.org
Local Treasures
is a bi-annual exhibition series that features artists who have made a
significant impact on the development of artistic practice in the Bay
Area. This year, the focus of
Local Treasures is photography. The exhibition is
curated
by Anne Veh, and includes work by Linda Connor, Hiroyo Kaneko, Klea
McKenna, J. John Priola, Unai San Martin and Richard Whittaker.
These
artists have contributed to the strength of contemporary photography in
the Bay Area by producing work that is fearless of constraints and
explores image making through both traditional and non-traditional
techniques.
About the artists:
Linda Connor,
a beloved instructor at the San Francisco Art Institute for more than
forty years, is well known for her large-format images from her
extensive travels to faraway places including, Egypt, Ethiopia, India,
Indonesia, Nepal, Peru, Tibet, Turkey, and as well as sojourns closer to
home, Hawaii and the East Coast.
With her large format camera,
Connor is drawn to the austere grandeur of the mountains and alluvial
plains of the Himalayas. Her photographs communicate a wisdom and force
held within Nature, but it is a view of Nature that is coupled with
Connor's other artistic subject.... the human cultural and spiritual
response to place. Ladakh, sometimes called the Little Tibet, was remote
to the outside world until the late Sixties, and fortunately unlike
Tibet, its Buddhist Monasteries were not decimated by a "Cultural
Revolution."
With a passion for the outdoors and the physicality of creating artwork in relationship to the natural world, Klea McKenna delights
in the unexpected. As a photographer, she prefers to work with several
analog photographic mediums: gelatin silver and chromogenic photographs
and photograms made outdoors in the forests at night. McKenna notes,
"This experimental approach means paring down to the simplest
ingredients –light and paper- and making images that refer to location
only through elemental form and color. I use a variety of crude
strategies; hand-made cameras, outdoor photograms, and methods of
folding film and paper to create sculptural images. The flawed material
sometimes becomes as visible as the image it has captured. Light, both
the science and magic of it, is at the center of all this." Her recent
series, Rain Studies are mesmerizing images of water dancing on paper made outdoors in the forests of Hawaii under a night sky.
Hiroyo Kaneko’s
foundation for her practice is her connection to her homeland and
family in Aomori Japan. She speaks of the clear light, which allows for
the luminous quality in her chromogenic prints, and the presence of
nature, which is beloved and honored in the countryside of her hometown.
Her images speak to the intimate relationship and nourishment we gain
from nature. Her recent body of work, Appearance, is inspired
by her feelings of alienation and separation, as experienced after
arriving in the United States eleven years ago. Keneko states, "Children
have their own physicality when singing. They seem to be standing at
the threshold of self-expression and self-consciousness. The act of
singing is both personal and social; my role as photographer is to catch
that moment when both aspects intersect."
Unai San Martin speaks with a passion and intimate understanding of the medium of photogravure. San Martin notes, "I
like working with my hands. Photogravures are made by hand, from
polishing the copper plate to pulling a print from the etching press. It
is a time consuming and unforgiving process, but I favor a slower
approach to image making. As in cooking, it is a way of putting my soul
into what I do." It is a medium for the fine art photographer. Of
Basque heritage, San Martin was raised in a family of craftsmen. His
father, an engraver, often took his son on sojourns through the Basque
countryside to visit masters of the trade. Blessed with a temperament
that honors patience and process, he has spent decades nurturing a
relationship with the medium and mastering the technique. The result are
images of exquisite beauty; they are of real places, yet carry a
sensibility of a mythic landscape. Whether cityscape, landscape, or
abstraction, each work expresses an emotional truth; the presence of the
artist is felt.
One experiences J. John Priola’s
black and white gelatin silver prints as one would a good poem. There
is an elegance to the ordering and space within each picture frame, and
an invitation to read beyond the ordinary. Consistently, his work
awakens all the senses to experience an inner and outer reflection. By
focusing the camera on what’s not there, he allows the invisible to
become visible. In his Farmhouse series, made collectively over
a six-year period, Priola found himself in locations across the country
where he could stay with friends. With his 4 X 5 camera, he would spend
time with the land making pictures of the space left by farmhouses,
defined by the remaining trees.
For more than thirty-five years, the camera has been a constant companion for Richard Whittaker
on road trips to the desert and national parks. Coupled with an innate
curiosity, Whittaker finds himself in strange lands where
anthropomorphic rock formations invite allegorical ruminations. Through
the eyes of the artist, one is transported to a land laden with stories.
Using a 35 mm, a digital, and at times a point and shoot camera, he is
able to dramatic compositions. Light, a quiet force in Whittaker's
landscapes, has an otherworldly pull.
