Continuing through June 4, 2016
The artists in the three-person show “Sightlines” have distinct approaches to landscape photography, and all are masters of their particular process. Dick Arentz, author of the popular textbook “Platinum & Palladium Printing” (2000), has been moving towards digital technology in the last decade. His new works offer romantic views of lochs, firths and rock outcroppings in Scotland that are rendered as archival pigment inkjet prints using Piezography inks, which give the photos an amazing range of blacks and heighten the possibilities of monochromatic images. One of Arentz’s most arresting images is “Stacs 3, St. Kilda, Scotland” (2012), in which dozens of birds circling a craggy pinnacle appear as flicks of ink on the paper.
Another veteran photographer, Jody Forster, capitalizes on the gelatin silver printing method to accentuate the majesty of the Southwestern landscape. In the tranquil “Winter Storm Clearing, Ortiz Mountains, New Mexico” (2010) the viewer realizes that the “sand” amid the desert scrub is actually snow. And the 30 by 40 inch “Hail Maker, New Mexico” (2007), which is quite large by gelatin silver standards, allows a magnificent tonal interplay of light and shadows across the composition’s dominant thunderhead.
Daniel Leivick is also sensitive to the sublime quality of landscapes, but his unusual process is to manipulate aerial images from Google Maps to the extent that desert floors, subdivisions, bombing ranges and mountain ranges verge on the abstract. A stunning example is the archival pigment inkjet print “Oilfield” (2013), where the view from above yields irregular lumps of black, brown and gray, with pockets of development reduced to dots. Leivick’s newfangled approach delivers an eerie beauty.
