From the Series "American Roads", by Henry Wessel, Jr.

When it opened in 1975, the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of the Man-altered Landscape shattered the staid traditions that had defined landscape photography to that point. It was dull, detached, and - many felt - ugly, but it changed photography. Nearly thirty-five years later, the “new topographic” style is widely practiced and admired strain of contemporary photographers.

New Topographics returns to the George Eastman House this summer, on view alongside an exhibition of contemporary Dutch landscape photography. Much has changed in the worlds of art and photography since 1975, a gulf nearly as wide as the difference in Dutch and American attitudes towards the land. An excerpt:

Nature as Artifice: New Dutch Landscape in Photography and Video Art features 19 contemporary artists who’ve transplanted the spirit of “new topography” to a much, much different location. While much of the original New Topographics work dissected the American West, consider this: the single state of Colorado is over six times the size of the Netherlands. Historically, the Dutch have never had the luxury of space, and their dense and still growing population has led to colossal projects where water is carefully controlled, the land drained and made useable for living and agriculture. The result is a landscape that is orderly and precise, eschewing the haphazard, “we’ll-just-put-it-here” anti-reasoning that infected American westward expansion.

Read the complete article at the Rochester City Newspaper website, and visit New Topographics and Nature as Artifice: New Dutch Landscape in Photography and Video Art at the George Eastman House.

Nature as Artifice: New Dutch Landscape in Photography and Video Art | Through August 16
New Topographics | Through September 27
George Eastman House, 900 East Ave.
Tue-Sat 10 a.m.-5 p.m. (Thu until 8 p.m.), Sun 1-5 p.m.
585-271-3361 | eastmanhouse.org

Troy (2008), oil on canvas. Painting by Ben Schwab.

Ben Schwab’s paintings and drawings of urban landscapes are visual explorations of architecture and time. Contemplating his work, you begin to understand the a view of a city is not an image of static mass of steel, glass, and concrete. Instead, his works show arrested moments revealing the existence of three simultaneous eras: the city’s past plans, its current appearance, and - look closely - hints of its future:

With his brush, he reduces streets, buildings, and bridges to shapes of nearly pure color; with his pencil, his talents as a precise draughtsman recreate supple architectural textures and details. … But his works reach beyond skill-driven retellings. As he looks out over a municipality, Schwab sees a swirl of past, present, and future, expressed in the human-made peaks and canyons of the urban landscape.

My review of his current exhibition is in this week’s City newspaper, and the show is on view at the University of Rochester’s Art and Music Library through June 12th.

ALB to NRT
Through June 12, 2009 | UR Art and Music Library, Rush Rhees Library
Mon, Thu & Fri 9 a.m.-5 p.m.; Tue-Wed 9 a.m.-7 p.m.
library.rochester.edu

From Dust to Gold (Installation View), photo by Luke Strosnider

My review of “From Dust to Gold” at the Danish Royal Library is included in the latest edition of Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism. Here’s a preview clip:

Former Oxford University librarian Falconer Madan’s observation that “The dust of one age is the gold of another” gives us the exhibition’s title, and the content spans the centuries from when printing technology was born to later eras of more refined publishing methods. Ranging from single sheets of text lacking any illustration to more elaborate feats of book arts, the works are organized by subject matter and provide a glimpse of the information people craved or needed. “Old News” presents the origins of the daily newspaper and features the oldest extant Danish news pamphlet, dating from 1542. Printed in Copenhagen, we learn “the true and terrible news” of a Silesian locust infestation “about such … that nobody has ever seen before.”

The rest of the review is just as riveting, peppered with all manner of insect attack! (Sorry, not true.) In any event, the show is on view through the end of 2009, so you’ve got plenty of time to make your way to Copenhagen to have a look.

From Dust to Gold
through December 31, 2009
The Black Diamond at the Royal Library
Copenhagen, Denmark

Meditative Algorithms, 2009 by Michael Taylor

My review of Michael Taylor’s exhibition of recent glass sculptures “A Unity of Opposites” hits newsstands literal and virtual today. Here’s a short excerpt:

All of Taylor’s work appears to depict serial movement via a motionless media, as if he began with geometric shapes, flung them through the air, photographed them à la Eadweard Muybridge, and then created his own sculptural interpretation of that process. Taylor’s “Escalating Spiral” uses clear glass wedges with turquoise highlighting to give form to a swinging, swaying, barrel-roll motion, while “Candidate Sequences for CJ” presents us with a clear half-circle, outlined in citrus orange and heavy red, careening off into space and time.

Read the full review at the CITY website, and see the exhibition at the Memorial Art Gallery, through June 28, 2009.

A Unity of Opposites: Recent Work by Micheal Taylor
Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, NY | through June 28, 2009

Untitled, from the series Orchard Park by Andy Lock © 2003

Andy Lock’s Orchard Park series is lovely and unsettling in equal measure. The images are warm, tender elegies for soon-to-be demolished apartments rendered in a difficult green hue. There’s a hint of a sinister presence, but the only intruder here is rich, supple light.

My review of his exhibition at the George Eastman House hits newsstands literal and virtual today. Here’s a short excerpt:

Little is left in the apartments of “Orchard Park,” but what does grace these rooms is a great deal of rich and supple light. Many walls feature what looks like distinctly modernist art pieces, silhouetted collaborations between the sun and the window’s shape. Other rooms contain literal beams of light, rays spanning from window to opposite wall in a hopeless structural gesture considering the building’s numbered days. Darkness has a monumental presence here, too. Robust contrast lends mass to the shadows, as if the blackness filling the corners of these rooms could be scooped up like a shovelful of coal.

Read the full review at the CITY website, and if you’re in Rochester, go see Andy Lock’s lecture tomorrow night!

Orchard Park: Photographs by Andy Lock
George Eastman House | January 24 - April 26, 2009
Artist’s Lecture: “Orchard Park: Utopia’s Ghosts”
Thursday, April 16 | Dryden Theatre | 6 p.m.