For the last month, we have been highlighting the work of three artists in our current exhibition, Photo Objects & Small Prints. You can read about the work in the show in the artists' own words here, here and here. This week I have asked David Emitt Adams, Kevin O'Connell and Zoë Zimmerman to elaborate on their pieces in the show.
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| David Emitt Adams, Saguaro #11 Tintype on found object |
"Never have I known the Arizona desert without roads, homes, buildings or urban sprawl. As long as people have been in the American West, we have found its barren desert landscapes to be an environment perfect for dumping and forgetting. I have explored this landscape with an awareness of the photographers who have come before me, and this awareness has led me to pay close attention to the traces left behind by others. For this body of work, I collect discarded cans from the desert floor, some over four decades old, which have earned a deep reddish-brown, rusty patina. This patina is the evidence of light and time, the two main components inherent in the very nature of photography. I use these objects to speak of human involvement with this landscape and create images on their surfaces through a labor-intensive 19th century photographic process known as wet-plate collodion. The result is an object that has history as an artifact and an image that ties it to its location. These cans are the relics of the advancement of our culture, and become sculptural support to what they have witnessed."–David Emitt Adams
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| Kevin O'Connell, #9382 Archival Pigment Print |
Kevin O'Connell
"These pictures are from the forth chapter in an ongoing journey through the Great Plains in eastern Colorado. Once a sea bottom, this now arid land is home to agriculture, oil and gas development, wind farms, and nuclear warheads. This chapter focuses the impact of water (and the absence thereof) in this region, as well as the continued depletion of a precious resource."–Kevin O'Connell
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| Zoë Zimmerman, Her Dream Albumen print |
Zoë Zimmerman
"These images are part of an on going collaboration between my daughter and I. When I began the series, my daughter was quite young and was cooperative and enjoyed the process of taking pictures with the big, old camera (cranky antique 8x10 studio camera). As she matured, she took on more of an active role in the creative end of the pictures coming up with her own ideas for images. Now when I tell her about a picture I would like to make of her she says, 'Yes, that would be good but after you do that can we do one that I want?' More often than not her concepts are more imaginative than mine. I’m ok with that. So is she." –Zoë Zimmerman