OXFORD, UK / On Display

On View Now:
14 New Photographic Works
Gallery 108 (beside the Cochenour Gallery)
LRC, Georgetown College

I had the opportunity to travel to Regent’s Park College at Oxford University during the first week of December, 2013 to make photographs of the college, our visiting students, and the city itself. The trip was two-fold: to create promotional materials for Georgetown College’s Oxford Programs and to produce some new personal work.

While there I resided in the Wheeler Robinson flat, a space dedicated to Georgetown faculty for times of research at the university, often while on sabbatical. Staying on campus allowed me to survey Regent's Park and mingle with both faculty and students, including coffee and biscuits in the Senior Commons Room and formal meals in Helwys Hall.

Each day afforded new opportunities to explore Oxford, from the bustling city centre to quiet farmland and pastures on the edge of town. Having travelled before to London, I was quickly reminded of the sense of tradition and history that is palpable as I walked the streets. It is a feeling I rarely encounter here in the states, and one that draws my attention as an artist.

The photographs presented here are only a small snippet of the larger body of work I created while in Oxford, but they are a few of my favorites – recounting moments of awe, discovery, appreciation, and perhaps a little humor.

Omnia probate quod bonum tenete,
Professor Darrell Kincer

Footnotes:
A special thank you to Dr. Brad Hadaway and Jason Snider for helping me organize and plan my first solo trip abroad. After all my worrying, it could not have gone any smoother.

Thank you to Georgetown College and my wife, Kristin, for granting me the time and opportunity to pursue this project. I could not have done it without your support.

Thank you to the viewers, for your interest in my work. If you think you would enjoy traveling to the UK to make photographs, I will be leading a CCSA trip to London and Dublin next winter. I’d love for you to join me!

And for further reading, you might check out Jennifer Moses' recent article in the New York Times about visiting Oxford.

Photo: Overlooking the Radcliffe Camera, 2013

R.C. May Lecture at UK: Catherine Opie

Exhibition: February 7 - March 9, 2014
Lecture: February 7, 4:00 PM in the UK Student Center's Worsham Theater

In Catherine Opie’s mid-career retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2008, the sheer range of her subject matter and corresponding stylistic approaches was dizzying. Her earliest work examines concepts of masculinity and feminity in lush color portraits of transgender individuals, cross-dressers, and pierced practitioners of sadomasochism in the subcultures of Los Angeles’s gay and lesbian community. She has also made encompassing seascapes that feel like color field paintings, both meditative and visually stunning. Always informed by art historical traditions, her seemingly unrelated series are united by her ability to embrace and document her subjects in a way that is both personal and true.

Image credit:
Catherine Opie, Sunset #1, 2009, C-print. Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles, © Catherine Opie

Content from The Art Museum at the University of Kentucky website: http://www.uky.edu/ArtMuseum/may_opie.html

Opportunities: Competition, Art Therapy, Open Studio

FROM CALLING & CAREER CENTER ON CAMPUS:  

I wanted to share an interior design competition that my company is working on with a client in case you have had any students express interest in interior design opportunities. We are working with the Habitat for Humanity ReStore on their new store launch in Richmond.  As part of the grand opening, they are hosting the Life ReStored Design Competition.  This competition will allow aspiring interior designers to compete for one of three design spots where they will have $500 to decorate a 10x10, 3-sided room on opening day using items from the ReStore. Here is the information for the competition: http://bit.ly/15ltUCD.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to let me know. We would greatly appreciate your help in promoting the competition!

Robert C. May Photo Lecture @ UK, Friday

DAVID HILLIARD

Exhibition: October 5 - November 11, 2012
Lecture: November 2, 4 pm
in the UK Student Center's Worsham Theater
FREE

David Hilliard’s expansive, multi-panel photographs invite the viewer into the world of his subjects. His portraits are panoramic in scale and suggest subtle narratives about the nature of love, family, adolescence, and sexuality. Often the work is based on his own life, as in a self-portrait of him with his father. Titled Rock Bottom, they are emerged in a lake, both connected and separated by the body of water between them.

Hilliard’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States in addition to venues in Spain, Germany, and France. He received a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2001 and a Fulbright Grant in 1995, among other honors, and his work is included in many collections, among them the Fogg Museum, Harvard University; George Eastman House, Rochester, N.Y.; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

DAVID HILLIARD, Mary Remembering, 2008, c-print, courtesy of the artist and Carroll & Sons, Boston

See original post HERE.

May Photo Lecture @ UK Friday

The last Robert C. May Photography Lecture of the semester/year is this coming Friday at 4 PM in the Worsham Theater of the Student Center at UK, featuring Jerry Spagnoli.

Jerry Spagnoli

Exhibition: March 11 - April 15, 2012
Lecture: March 23, 4 PM

"Jerry Spagnoli has made a career of delving into the qualities that make photography such a strong and compelling of both art and communication. He employs a wide variety of photographic processes and his work has been influenced by such diverse pictorial traditions as Renaissance sculpture and German Romantic landscape painting. Spagnoli has become best known, however, for leading the contemporary revival of the daguerreotype, which was invented in the 1830s and produces a unique image on polished silver." quoted from UK Art Museum website.

Click HERE to read and find out more.

All exhibitions are in the Richard B. Freeman Gallery of the Art Museum
All lectures are held on Friday afternoons at 4 PM in the Worsham Theater of the UK Student Center
(Euclid Ave & Martin Luther King Blvd)
Exhibitions and lectures are Free

Above Image: New York Giants Tickertape Parade, February 7, 1012 by Jerry Spagnoli

Amy Stein @ UK on Friday

The first Robert C. May photography lecture of the spring semester is this Friday at 4:00 PM in the Worsham Theater of the UK Student Center. The series this year focuses on the "constructed" photographic image. Amy Stein, whose work is on exhibit in the UK Art Museum, will be speaking about her photographs. To see more of her work, click HERE.

Quoted from the UK Art Museum website...

Lecture: February 10, 2012

Exhibition: January 22 to March 4, 2012

Amy Stein photographs a new incarnation of the natural world in her series Domesticated. A bear peers over a fence at a girl standing on a diving board, both frozen at the encounter. A fawn takes shelter in the warmth of a green house, wild cats perch in the skeleton of a home under construction. In a world in which animals like coyotes are becoming common in suburbia, the interaction between humans and wildlife requires adaptation on the part of both. 

Stein set out to investigate themes of human domination over the natural world in the twenty-first century, but as she began working in the northeastern Pennsylvania town of Matamoras, people began telling her about the encounters with wild creatures and she discovered a far more complex narrative. “Each story was relayed with a sense of wonder and fascination that hinted at a deeper connection,” she says. “I began to realize that something far more primal and mystical was happening in this town.” 

Click HERE to read more.

Hope to see you there.

Prof. Kincer

Image above: AMY STEIN, Watering Hole, 2005, C-print

This Friday @ UK: May Photo Lecture & Open Studio

Two events happening this Friday at UK:

1) The second Robert C. May Photo Lecture of the semester, featuring Julie Blackmon at 4 PM in the Worsham Theatre, UK Student Center. Find out more HERE.

2) UK Fine Arts Open Studio—a great chance to tour UK's art department, see student work and make new art friends. The event is from 6–10 PM in the Reynolds Building. Find out more HERE.

Hope to see you there.

Robert C. May Photo Lecture Friday

Mark Klett
Lecture: 4 PM, Worsham Theatre in the Student Center at the University of KY (Euclid Ave & MLK Blvd, Lexington)
Exhibition: October 9–November 13, University of KY Art Museum, Singletary Center

"Mark Klett walks in the footsteps of nineteenth-century photographers who journeyed to the great wilderness of the American West and created iconic images that helped define us as a nation. His work at locations like Yosemite National Park and the Grand Canyon examines the intersection of time and place, analyzing how we conceptualize both.

Klett, who trained as a geologist, takes a long view of the landscape. In 1977, he and two colleagues began the Rephotographic Survey Project. Looking at photographs made a century earlier, they located the exact vantage points used by Carlton Watkins, William Henry Jackson, and others, and then meticulously rephotographed the view. The old and new images, published side-by-side in a 1984 book called Second View, revealed both enduring geographic features and the human impact on the environment.

In recent years, collaborating with Byron Wolfe, Klett has created large scale panoramas that merge his own photographs with historic views, uniting past and present in a visual continuum. In Rock Formations on the Road to Lee’s Ferry, AZ, two black-and-white 1872 photographs by William Bell are seamlessly inserted into a contemporary digital color image of the scene. The road through the sun-bleached desert eerily disappears in the old photographs and humans sitting on the ground are dwarfed by dramatic rock formations. In the present day, a camper chugs out of the past in a terrain that has barely changed in one hundred and thirty years, save for that stretch of blacktop.

Klett has expanded the range of historic images he uses to embrace classic modernist photographs from the 1930s by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, vintage postcards, and historic drawings and sketches. However, he continues to meld old and new, creating a sense of past and present co-existing.

Klett’s work has been exhibited and published nationally and internationally for more than three decades and is part of the collection of more than eighty museums worldwide, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. He has received fellowships from Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Japan/US Friendship Commission. He is the author of thirteen books, including Saguaros (2007); Yosemite in Time (2005); and Third Views, Second Sights (2005), a follow-up to Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project (1984). Klett is Regents Professor of Art at Arizona State University in Tempe." from UK Art Museum website

To find out more, click HERE.

Photo Lecture @ UK Friday

Each year four artist-photographers speak at the University of Kentucky's Robert C. May Photography Lecture Series. This coming Friday, November 5, marks the first in the series.

Jeff Liao will be presenting his work in the Worsham Theatre in UK's Student Center at 4:00 PM. The lectures usually last about an hour. In addition work by the artist is typically on exhibit in UK's Art Museum, a short walk from the student center. Many times the speaker will go to the museum afterward to greet and talk to lecture attendees.

The lectures are usually a highlight of the academic calendar for me and I do my best to attend each one. I hope you might consider joining me for this and future May Lectures.

Click HERE to find out more about Jeff Liao.

Click HERE to find out more about the lecture schedule for this year.

Bookends or Lap Joint

Opening reception tomorrow, Thursday, October 28 from 5-7 in the Tuska Gallery at UK, located on Rose Street in the Fine Arts Building (next door to the Singletary Center for the Arts). The show will run from October 28-November 11. Click for HERE for more info.

I hope that you will have the opportunity to come to the opening, or at least see the show before it closes. This is a great chance to see your faculty exhibiting work that you won't want to miss. How often do you get to see your professors practice what they preach?

I have to say that this has been a fantastic experience. Daniel and I had so much fun collaborating and working together. And although it has been exhausting pulling this off, it has certainly been worth the investment.

If you're not aware of how the show works, Daniel and I looked back at our careers (all they way back to our first art classes in college) and created a chronological installation of pieces that stood out to us, culminating in eight collaborative works that we just finished yesterday. My earliest piece is from 1997 and Daniel's, 1998. You could say that there's 2.5 decades worth of work in this show.

It's a bit strange to look back over ten years of work that you've created. I couldn't have ever imagined this day when I took my first art class at Asbury. It's a little overwhelming at times. And I think that may be why this show will be so interesting to our students. They'll have a chance to see what we were doing in college, and, I think, view a lot of work that they've never seen. So again, I hope you get a chance go.

Note: my photos above are purposefully pixelated to protect the innocent (art works).