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Lawrence V Toole Insurance Inc
Distance: 0.6 MiPO Box 319
01238-0319 Lee -
Andrew Devries
Distance: 3.5 Mi62 Church St
01240 Lenox -
The Wit Gallery
Distance: 3.5 Mi27 Church St
01240-2646 Lenox -
Dai Ban Studio
Distance: 3.3 Mi34 Prospect Hill Rd
01262 Stockbridge -
G2 Photo
Distance: 8.7 MiPO BOX 852
01230 Great Barrington
Website Links
Description
<body leftMargin="0" topMargin="0" rightMargin="0" MS_POSITIONING="GridLayout" onload="showBody('The body of work that can be viewed in Gallery 4 was completed in the early to mid 1980s. The subject matter is primarily architecture and the images were all shot with a minimalist approach emphasizing geometric shapes, and strong colors. For nearly a decade after that, my work was devoted to a single project, photographing at recreational sites throughout America: amusement parks, state fairs, miniature golf courses and the like (Gallery 2). With this work I attempted to reveal the artificial, surreal character of these environments while using an underlying geometric structure to create visually complex images. As the work progressed over the years I orchestrated an increasing number of elements to the point where I literally crammed the picture with information. In the exciting new area of science known as Chaos Theory, researchers observe that at some high level of complexity, bordering on chaos, a new structure emerges from a system which is greater than the sum off its parts. New phenomena are produced through a particular balance between order and disorder. There is a magical region where an unexpected " higher " order emerges. A point where, like some forms of jazz, everything is not in perfect harmony yet a novel, vibrant music is heard. Over the past 10 years I have explored the possibilities of making even more visually dense images by capturing subjects in this zone, " The Edge of Chaos." Gallery 3 contains images from the past decade that are connected, not by subject matter, but through a compositional strategy of high visual density. In the mid 1990s I began photographing the debris from man-made structures destroyed by natural disasters, fires, and demolitions as well as materials gathered at salvage yards and recycling centers. While the demolition and disaster scenes speak of loss and devastation and the scrap heaps comment on our consumer society, from a purely visual standpoint these subjects allowed me to move to the next level in my exploration of complexity in straight color photography. Unlike my earlier work, the compositions in Gallery 3 (and even some of the later pieces in Gallery 2) are now extracted from scenes that have varying degrees of randomness rather than ones that has some preexisting order to them. My approach has become more intuitive, my palette more restrained. The overall form has become less structured as I continue to be drawn to the hidden compositional possibilities of haphazard scenes and chance occurrences. Most recently I have taken my "Edge of Chaos" approach to the natural world where seaweed swirls, tangled branches and ordinary groundcovers have provided new possibilities for exploring complex photographic imagery (Gallery 1). For me, exploring that magical space that exists where order and chaos merge allows new levels of meaning to emerge from unsightly urban landscapes and banal nature scenes. At the heart of all of these photographs is my attempt to recognize an unexpected elegance at sites generally thought to be aesthetically barren, to serve up a visual feast, to hear the music buried beneath the noise.