Viewpoint Exhibit History

This exhibit showcases new work by students currently enrolled in classes at the high school or college level. Submissions were open to the full range of photographic techniques (i.e., film, digital, alternative process, pinhole, mixed media, digital manipulation, montage, photogram, hand-colored, etc.).

Come see what the students in our region are doing!

In its main gallery for March, Viewpoint Photographic Art Center presents the art of Raven Victoria Erebus and Gail Parris in an exhibition titled Avian Studies. While all of prints in the exhibit begin with photographs of birds, both artists employ sophisticated image-processing and printing techniques to create pictures with an intent much different from the description that is the dominate feature of “straight” photography.

“Beauty is all around us,” avers Raven Victoria Erebus; “it’s ordinary and stunning, secretive and fleeting, cold and struggling, singing down the sun.” In The Language of Birds, Erebus demonstrates the depth of her commitment to that beauty.

In The Artistry of Birds, Gail Parris emulates the look and feel of Japanese and other woodblock prints, attempting to capture the "spirit" of the bird in a way similar to Inuit stone prints. She photographs the birds against simple backgrounds, or uses various techniques to deemphasize the backgrounds when digitally processing the images.

In February, the Viewpoint’s main gallery features two photographers who seek to bring attention to parts of California that are generally overshadowed by the state’s urban culture, technology and entertainment industries, and spectacular geography. Both challenge us to look at and think about aspects of our society that we might know or care little about.

Photojournalist Max Whittaker's project In the Shadow of the Sun is a rebuttal to the typical representation of California as a land of wealth and beauty.” California “isn’t just Hollywood and Silicon Valley, Yosemite and Napa,” Max asserts. “It’s also the state with the highest rate of poverty in the nation.”

Jim Klein's project Wheatland Snapshots is inspired by Eugène Atget’s lifelong documentation of Paris, as well as by the work of later photographic documentarians such as Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Stephen Shore. As his subject he chose Wheatland, a small town between Lincoln and Marysville. “I roamed the town with my camera,” he says, “in an attempt to capture its unique nature, spirit, and culture,” to “make a pictorial statement about the town and its people.”

In January, Viewpoint’s main gallery features Robert Mackler and James Canning, two artists who use contemporary photographic tools and techniques to create striking abstract images.

Over the past forty years, Robert Mackler’s photographic activities have been divided between scientifically-oriented botanical studies and fine art images. Most of the latter would be classified as abstract, though Mackler prefers Ansel Adams' term "extractions" because the images are small, carefully isolated portions of the visual environment. “The aleatory nature of discovering beautiful images in an urban setting is very exciting,” Mackler states. “What formerly seemed irritating and unnecessary blight now generates fascination.”

A visual artist who has worked in many media, James Canning has always enjoyed photography and began creatively modifying his photographs long before Photoshop was invented. He discovered early on that patterns within nature are not only beautiful by themselves, but suggest structures and shapes that evoke other worlds as well. “Nature is filled with patterns we recognize and many that we don't,” Canning says. “Sometimes we seek patterns that may not be there; often we fail to see those that are, and we certainly see them where there aren't any!”

The 2013 theme for the fifth annual December juried exhibit is Twelve: Natural Magic. The title conjures the16th century Italian thinker Giambattisa della Porta's, writings on the nature of light. Because of his studies with projected light, della Porta was arrested for sorcery during the Inquisition! Since this is Twelve in 2013, Natural Magic carries the mystic of the number 13 clothed in the magical qualities of light, the wellspring of photography. Each year the Twelve show is characterized by creative and skillful interpretations of the theme of the exhibit. With Natural Magic, this well-established tradition continues as the interpretations appeal both to the eye and the imagination.

In November, Viewpoint’s Main Gallery features three photographers – David Ashcraft, Jimmy Fike, and Magnus Stark – who have three very different approaches to making photographic art.

David Ashcraft is a Californian whose work fits comfortably in the tradition of West Coast photography. He studied with many of the iconic West Coast photographers, including John Sexton, Richard Garrod, Alan Ross, and Henry Gilpin. His subject matter centers on the hallowed West Cost themes of the natural landscape, closely observed details, and abstractions.

Jimmy Fike’s exhibit comprises selections from his series, J.W. Fike’s Photographic Survey of the Wild Edible Botanicals of the North American Continent. “Within my system,” Fike explains, “the plant is excavated, arranged in the studio, photographed, then illustrated digitally in such a way as to render the edible parts in color while the remaining parts, less emphatically, read as photograms.

Magnus Stark, who was born in Sweden and resides in Bangor, Maine, makes film-based images without using a camera. “Like a chemist in a lab, I experiment with the raw film by sometimes treating it with a variety of common organic substances, before exposing it to extreme elements. What happens to film if you pop it in the microwave? Submerge it in a hot tub? Stick it in the freezer? And what happens if you do that for an hour, a week, a month or a year?”

In Stu Levy’s Grid-Portraits, several negatives are contact-printed in a grid arrangement to create “a space and time scan,” function both as environmental portraiture and as explorations of how we perceive complex imagery. Referring to the phrase Henri Cartier-Bresson famously used to characterize his photographic ideal, Levy states, “this work gives a new meaning to ‘The Decisive Moment’, for the lattice-window view presents a maze of scrambled time and recombinant architecture.”

“Perception involves the visual synthesis of incremental spaces at finite points of time,” Levy explains. “These photographs of artists and craftspeople explore and challenge our perceptive processes by testing the limits of discontinuity, in both space and time, which our brains will accept in reading an image.”

Gary Cawood began his ongoing body of photographs, Excavation, in 2006. “Since the natural landscape is considered expendable in our culture, the surface scars we create seemed like an intriguing subject to explore,” he explains. “I selected sites that were excavated long ago, and at first I focused on the surprising forms and colors created by erosion. Soon I began adding throwaways to the compositions. Like the land, much of the stuff we buy is considered disposable and makes its way to sites like these. I utilized the scarred landscape as a context for the stuff we abandon.”

In the latest images in the evolving project, Cawood finds himself drawn to “the castoffs of the landscape itself rather than man-made stuff. By focusing more on the natural elements, the recent work emphasizes the ability of the landscape to recover and reinvent itself, even as we continue to disrupt its inherent balance.”

In August, Viewpoint Photographic Art Center presents the photographs of Dale Crandall-Bear in an exhibition called Marking Time: A Journey through Ancient Lands.

“In the spring of 2008,” says Crandall-Bear, “I embarked on a long-anticipated journey into distant time. I sought an encounter with the ancient past – beyond the youth of my own country and beyond the ‘middle age’ of Europe. I found what I was looking for in the deserts of Egypt, in the back alleys of Damascus, and on the barren plains of Anatolia. The images in this exhibit are the photographic impressions of that journey.”

The annual Viewpoint Members’ Exhibit, a long-time tradition at Viewpoint, is always exciting for the quality and range of photographic art it showcases. Because it gives all Viewpoint members an opportunity to showcase one image of their choosing, the exhibit highlights the diversity of techniques, approaches, and personal visions in our photographic community.

In June, Viewpoint Photographic Art Center presents in its main gallery the photographs of László Bencze in an exhibition titled Onsite: Men of Mining.

“Mining companies get a bad rap in the press,” says László. “No one wants a mine in their back yard. On the other hand everyone wants computers, TV sets, cars, cameras, washing machines, cell phones and all the other good stuff of modern culture. And just about all of that good stuff begins life somewhere in the ground.

“The people of mining work hard, safe, and honorably, taking pains to cause as little damage to the environment as possible and remediating that which is inevitable. I have enjoyed my assignments onsite and have come to admire these dedicated workers, craftsmen, and artisans who transform dirt into the raw material of civilization.

In January, Viewpoint Gallery honors Gene Kennedy with a retrospective exhibition that he intriguingly calls 44 Years of Real Estate Photographs.

“For many years, I have struggled to find a single phrase that describes what I do photographically,” Kennedy states. “From nature photography to landscape photography to architectural photography to environmental documentary photography to humorous photography to Gladding McBean photography — nothing covers it all. Recently, as I turned my career energies in a new direction ... I stumbled onto that elusive phrase.”