The Eye, The Lens, The Story
The Eye, The Lens, The Story is our first all photography based exhibition at The CAMP Gallery. Featuring works from: Xan Padron, Marisa S. White, Naomi White, Remijin Camping, Natalie Obermaier, Rosana Machado Rodriguez, Alice de Kruijs, and Carol Erb the exhibition focuses on what has caught the eye of these artists. Divided by subject the exhibition will look at landscape and architectural photography, portraiture and objects while focusing on the moment of the image and what it can suggest. The eye of the photographer is, naturally, paramount to the art of photography. The artist strives to capture what is unique, but also familiar often reporting back to the viewer where we are in the present.
Starting with Xan Padron, his work focuses on streets across the globe showing the passage of time against the immobility of architecture. Many things are happening, simultaneously in the frozen image – elements of life, commuting, crossing paths, and the travel of time. The works question much about life, one thing being is how many nameless faces one encounters in a day, and how interestingly those encounters often become a distraction to the day, and sometimes an almost insistent rejection of community. Marisa S. White, known for her unique eye ‘weaves’ unexpected images into one composition guiding the viewer to look outside of the ordinary and to delve into the imagined. Her works also fill in voids of expression as they offer alternative views on the mundane, replacing that with what can be considered as imagination reawakening the sometimes banality of life. Naomi White, often focuses her attention towards the environment but on occasion turns her eye towards the individual and the intimate. In the selection of works included in this exhibition, White tempts us to look closely at the compositions her small works have orchestrated inviting an almost voyeuristic approach. RemiJin Camping, based in Miami works in many photographic applications exploring what often seems like layers on her topic. For her works in this exhibition, the subject is nature – but not the nature we encounter, but the nature she creates. Through different processes she sharpens her image and focuses on an unexpected encounter between the object, herself, and the viewer. Seeing this series of works as an expression of life, and that brings what we least expect, so too do these images – bring forth a perspective very much unexpected.
Natalie Obermaier through layers and strips presents her works for the exhibition as collages – hand woven ones, at that adding a new approach to representations of women under the cloak of fashion. What becomes interesting, considering the above is the layers not just of the work, but the symbolism at its root. Considering the plastering of an image upon someone, wether through fashion or adaptation to ones environment, or circle, Obermaier enhances this by suggesting there is more than the surface. It is the culmination of all the layers of an individual that make a person and therefore her work asks for acceptance for all that one is – the good, the bad, the beautiful, the unknown. Rosana Machado Rodriquez prints her images on textiles and embroideries faces into the composition exploring the ‘intersection of nature, memory and shared experiences.’ In so doing, she highlights the connection between nature and the individual arguing the dependence of both on the other, the protection offered by both, and subtly suggests the destructive quality of both humankind and nature, with one caveat – nature destroys to to regenerate, humans destroy to control and erase. The idea of this erasure is also seen in the ‘ghost like’ portraits, or memories stitched on the works showing the temporal quality of all life. Alice De Kruijs, also focuses on the small and intimate and presents works swirling in the mystical of foreign cultures and enhances this experience with twists and jumbles of threads, adding to the layers, exoticism and erotic. In some instances apparently hiding the faces of her subjects, De Kruijs, compels one to imagine, and in so doing, on one hand reinforces the exotic, but also criticizes this tendency as reductive of self.
Lastly, Carol Erb looks at architecture, and the angles and shadows edged by light. Looking towards a romanticized landscape Erb’s works herald in a warm invitation to explore the landscapes she sees as though just discovered. Through her work one is able to imagine what once was, what could be and what still remains, wrapping different stories throughout each piece.
