Photo Objects & Small Prints: Kate Breakey, James Pitts & Rachelle Thiewes

photo-eye Gallery Photo Objects & Small Prints: Kate Breakey, James Pitts and Rachelle Thiewes Kate Breakey, James Pitts and Rachelle Thiewes discuss their work in photo-eye Gallery's Photo Objects & Small Prints exhibition.

This week I've asked Kate Breakey, James Pitts and Rachelle Thiewes to offer some insight into their working processes behind their pieces in our current exhibition, Photo Objects & Small Prints. Other features from this show can be found here, here, here and here.

Kate Breakey, Desert Cottontail
Hand-colored silver gelatin print, Edition of 7
$1080 framed

Kate Breakey
In 1834, William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877) saw that silver salts darkened in the sun and invented a photographic process he called “photogenic drawing” — in which images were made without a camera, the subject simply laid on chemically treated paper and exposed to light. This is the archaic process I use to make Las Sombras. These are the remains of living things — plants, reptiles, mammals, insects, and birds. They make their own image, a kind of shadow, which will last long after they are gone. Their ghostly imprints, are burned directly onto paper with light and with love to make a permanent record. I've made these ‘photograms’ of everything I find dead — from deer and coyote to bees and moths — as well as flowers and weeds from my back yard, in an attempt to document and chronicle the natural world which is my endless inspiration as an artist.

James Pitts, Platinum/Palladium Prints
Editions of 20, $400 each

James Pitts
The photographs are largely about order and control i.e. the utilization of formal classical compositional tools to structure an ideal representation of reality. This is how I want the world to be rather than the way it is.






Rachelle Thiewes

Rachelle Thiewes, earrings
Steel, silver, auto paint
$2500

The Chihuahuan desert of west Texas, where I live, has played a pivotal role in shaping the way I approach my jewelry. The barren mountains with the desert pushed up to their edges are bold, dramatic, aggressive and seductive, providing a continual source of inspiration and study. The luminous energy of light that baths the desert can swiftly transform from sharp and shrieking to subtle and sensual, all within a day’s time. Capturing the refraction and dispersal of light with my jewelry through the orchestration of body motion has held my fascination for decades and continues to challenge and inform my ideas of light. My jewelry of recent years explores the intense iridescent and color-shifting paints used for those eye-catching custom jobs on cars. A necklace or bracelet comes alive when it is on a body in motion. Tangible movement is implied by the deceptive appearance of collapsing forms, the swift color-shifts on the jewelry’s surfaces and the consequences of light apparent in the shadow drawings and color imprints on the wearer’s skin. The jewelry's surfaces and angles create a perceived motion not unlike a sleek car that seems to be on the go even standing still. The shifting colors only add to the illusion.

Photo Objects & Small Prints is up through February 1, 2014. For more information, please email the gallery at gallery@photoeye.com or call 505-988-5152 ext 202.