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An Uneven Field: Display of college students' photographs finds some gems that stand out from the crowd
Photo Courtesy of Holly Wilbur
Blue Winter by Holly Wilbur is part of an Artworks Gallery show.
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Published: May 24, 2009
Nowadays just about everyone is a photographer -- or thinks he is -- thanks to the advent and mass popularization of digital photography. But to be a photographer requires more than just the ability to operate a camera-phone. It demands a special quality of attention to the visual world and an ability to adequately translate what you see -- and what you think or feel about it -- into a photographic image.
These observations are prompted by photographs I looked at recently in two exhibitions in the Arts District -- a group exhibit at 5ive & 40rty made up of photographs mostly by students from colleges and universities in the Piedmont Triad, and a duo show at Artworks Gallery featuring photographs by Holly Wilbur. Both exhibitions are on view through Saturday.
Hastily organized to fill a three-week gap in 5ive & 40rty‘s exhibition schedule, the group show there is descriptively titled "Unframed, Unedited." In view of those qualifiers, it's no surprise that the word "Uneven" could also be accurately added to that title. The show brings together more than 40 images by 11 photography students from the Triad's higher-educational institutions and four other individuals who make photographs.
Most of these images are displayed unframed, double-clamped at the top to one of two thin metal cables stretched horizontally at eye level along the gallery's north and south walls. Because most of these images are made by students and look like student work, the presentation suggests images hung up for a faculty critique -- a session at which a teacher or visiting artist evaluates and constructively criticizes students' creative efforts.
Among the relatively small number of photographs that clearly stand out from the larger field are two by UNC at Greensboro student John Read --a Mapplethorpesque black-and-white close-up of a Lily, and a tight color shot of a generic concrete cherub statue's face encrusted with luminous green moss.
Joy Ritenour, a business partner of 5ive & 40rty's director Amy Garland, renders an ordinary scene extraordinary in her Organic Sunday, a sepia-toned view of a domestic backyard through the rope mesh of a hammock in the foreground. And in Hunting Bus Grayson County Ritenour manages to make an old school bus with a do-it-yourself camouflage paint job -- temporarily out of commission and resting on stacks of wood and concrete blocks in an evidently remote rural setting -- look like a contemporary site work in a pastoral public sculpture park.
Two of the show's other noteworthy photographs are by Maclain Bryant. His Old Salem, a black-and-white image of a religious statue with arms upraised toward a sky half full of high raked-looking clouds, effectively conjures the idea of transcendence. And his Santorini, a turquoise-hued view of stucco architecture overlooking a rocky coastline and a stretch of the Mediterranean Sea, looks as if it belongs on a poster promoting travel to that Greek island (also known as Thera).
Also worth mentioning are the show's three images by UNC-Greensboro student Ami Talley, particularly Sand Trees, a close-up of watery rivulets on sandy ground.
Across Trade Street at Artworks, Holly Wilbur's color photographs make up her half of a duo exhibition with her fellow Artworks cooperative member E.O. Hill. The selection of Wilbur's work -- fairly consistent compared to "Unframed, Unedited" -- includes 15 individual cityscape images and a piece titled Transportation, consisting of 132 color images of cars, trucks and vans -- each image slightly larger than a postage stamp -- arranged in a grid on a single, unframed panel.
Almost all of Wilbur's cityscape photographs highlight the interplay of urban architecture, patches of sky and their reflections in puddles of rainwater. Her Suite 300, for example, centers on the reflection of a pale, multi-story office building in a puddle whose choppily wind-rippled surface creates a visual effect suggesting that the building is about to dematerialize. In her related black-and-white photograph Appetite, the reflection of what might be an empty billboard framework is similarly distorted so that it vaguely suggests a calligraphy rendition of a Chinese linguistic character.
In Wilbur's Blue Winter, delicate white cumulus clouds in a blue sky are reflected in still rainwater shallowly pooled across the top of a flat concrete roof, while remote-seeming houses and other buildings stretch across the distant background beyond the rooftop. The focal point for the image, in the immediate foreground, is a small stone or similar object whose significance is amplified by the relatively long shadow it casts.
Hill's portion of the Artworks show consists of 10 graphite drawings of his pet dogs, which are likely based on photographs, given their straightforward representational approach and the fact that they capture brief moments in the lives of animals typically in motion. These adult dogs and puppies, which appear to be Dalmatians, are depicted panting with outstretched tongues, playing with dog toys, interacting affectionately with each other or otherwise engaged.
A highlight among these drawings -- which come perilously close to being too cute -- is Spanky, a frontal head image of an open-mouthed dog with his eyes wide and his ears alertly pricked up. Another is Heads & Tails, whose canine subject investigates a small snake wriggling in front of its nose. These images owe something of a conceptual debt to artist William Wegman, known largely for his set-up photographs of his pet Weimaraners.
■ "Unframed, Unedited" is on view at 5ive & 40rty, 541-A North Trade St.; call 724-2474. Photographs by Holly Wilbur and E.O. Hill are on view at Artworks Gallery, 564 N. Trade St.; call 723-5890. Both shows continue through Saturday.
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