A friend of mine, Joe Nalven, is part of a three man show of photography that is coming up in Late April and May, 2009. The work looks most interesting and the idea behind the show, great. Poway is in California, USA.
An exhibit by Will Gibson, Joe Nalven and Paul Sewell
April 29 to May 26
at the Poway Center for the Performing Arts
Times3 brings together the photography of Will Gibson, Joe Nalven and Paul Sewell. The show opens April 29th at the Poway Center for the Performing Arts and continues through May 26th. They each show two bodies of work, both past and present, revealing an element of time as part of their individual journeys as artists.
In his series of photographs about Bodie, California, Gibson describes his images of this place that has been frozen in the past and slowly surrendering to the elements. “Not only can one imagine the wild era in the 1800’s when silver mining brought both fortune and ruin to many, but the effects of time on what used to be the third largest city in California are evident everywhere.”
Time is a photographer’s tool. It is inherent in every photograph. Gibson has explored many photographic paths, “but one that continually intrigues me is that involving long exposures and the compression of time into one image. Things the naked eye cannot see are revealed; the motion of the earth, shadows of the night illuminated, the trail of cars across a bridge. In addition, I often walk into a scene and light it by hand, selecting and highlighting important elements, leaving my mark fleetingly on the landscape, recorded moment to moment by the open lens.”
Joe Nalven superimposes his notions of time with different media, inviting a different point of departure for these compositions. In one series, Israel Infrared, Nalven inquires into the changes that have shaped Israel. “I was fascinated with Israel’s history as it reaches back into antiquity, revealing a multiplicity of selves: tribal, state, religious and secular. This is a place contested by competing empires as well as a place of autonomy. The question for me was how to use a photographic conversation to show Israel’s definitional process from times past to the present moment.”
In a second series, Motion and Pause, Nalven captures the fluidity of the human form and melds it into brushed metal. “I would like the viewer to experience the sculptural effect of each image by itself and then to revisit the entire series in juxtaposition. The effect shifts; it is more energetic.”
Paul Sewell’s first series Traveling Light, brings together over twenty years of street and travel photography. Sewell has a way of documenting his surrounding that is natural and provocative. Stories abound within the borders of his images. One is motivated to explore these scenes further and thus the viewer is as much captured as the view. With his observant eye Sewell gives us first a reference point with panoramas from atop Notre Dame or a hilltop in San Francisco, then takes us for a closer look to catch fleeting moments in a London subway or outside a bar at night in New Orleans. The simple things . . . a skip of a stone, a bundled walker . . . these moments caught are straightforward bits of time that speak of the everyday and, as Sewell says, “the things that go unnoticed.”
For his second series, Abandoned Americana, Sewell delves into the world of color. “I wanted to document an America of times gone by, of places and objects long forgotten, and color was the best way to achieve this.” Sewell captures places such as Route 66 and the Salton Sea using a color pallet that takes the viewer on an almost ethereal journey to a place and time that was simpler. A time when “Anything was possible.”
Exhibit information
The Poway Center for the Performing Arts is located at 15498 Espola Road. It is open Monday to Friday from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Admission to the gallery area is free.
A reception for the artists will be held Sunday, May 3, from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m.
The public is invited.
