Email: rcmitche@cc.ysu.edu
Artist’s
Statement:
August 28 — September 29, 2000
Point-of-View—Photographs by
RICHARD MITCHELL
Westminster College
Art Gallery
Gallery hours:Daily 9 - 9 p.m.
—Artist’s Statement—
The
work in this exhibition continues a love for traditional film-based photography,
while beginning a journey into the image-making of digitally enhanced photographs.
The
nature of my work has always been rooted in the descriptive power of the camera,
its film and print paper. In the face of mechanical recording, the challenge
for a photographer who aspires to art, is to make images that transcend the
very nature of the machine(s) which create them. Today, that transcendence includes
the computer.
The
idea (to paraphrase Ansel Adams) that the negative represents a score, and the
print a performance, gives the photographer the opportunity to reinterpret the
original photographic intent. Most of the images in this exhibition come from
negatives that were made 20 to 30 years ago. Some have remained windows, while
others have become mirrors.
This
aspect of photography—the recording of visual information which can be
revisited over time, and performed with new forms and processes— was a
powerful component in my choice to move from painting to photography. A sense
of location and time, as well as sound and direction, are clearly inscribed
on my compass.
My
work intends to do two things. First, to have the reader understand that perception
is a very personal experience. That while we seek common ground and some agreement
in our reading of images, it is no less true for art as it is for science, that
the instrument of perception affects what is perceived.
Secondly,
that the formal aspects of the language used, significantly guides that perception.
Images are repeated, but changed in size, color, texture and intervention—
in order to explore and expand an understanding of what it is to make and read
a photograph.
The
source for the work is my more than thirty-year love affair with the people
and places of Latin America.
This
exhibition of photographs uses the people of Latin America, their Pre-Columbian
heritage, and a matrix of traditional and digital photography to form the basis
for an exploration of meaning.
It
is a journey as much about the meaning of photography, as it is about an understanding
of subject.
RICHARD
MITCHELL
September, 2000
In
1992, a one-man exhibition of 37 photographs at the Galleria Jorge Martinez
at the University of Guadalajara, Mexico, preceded exhibitions at the Butler
Institute of American Art—A Pre-Columbian Archive, and at the McDonough
Museum of Art—The Changing Paradigm-Aspects of Photographic Interpretation.
Images in those exhibitions relate to the work exhibited here.
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Email: rcmitche@cc.ysu.edu |