Beyond The Horizon: The Changing Global Ecology

JANUARY 20 – FEBRUARY 18, 2023

When visual artists create work, they bring intentionality into their respective medias. They use their artwork as a platform to express whatever they wish to communicate. Painters and sculptors begin with blank slates and through paint, watercolor, clay, plaster or bronze they build a two or three dimensional surface. In contrast, photographers almost universally create their work through the lens of a camera. Because of its ability to capture, either through film emulsion or pixels, a replica of what is presented in the click of a shutter, the media of photography has the complexity of being both subjective and objective. Generally, photographers are defined by a work created in an instant. However, what if a photographer desires to preserve more than in instant? What if they want to present 24 hours compressed into a single two-dimensional image? What if they want to examine and redefine the relationship that photographers have with the idea of time itself? These are the challenges that have occupied Stephen Wilkes in his “Day to Night” series of photographs for the last decade.

When visual artists create work, they bring intentionality into their respective medias. They use their artwork as a platform to express whatever they wish to communicate. Painters and sculptors begin with blank slates and through paint, watercolor, clay, plaster or bronze they build a two or three dimensional surface. In contrast, photographers almost universally create their work through the lens of a camera. Because of its ability to capture, either through film emulsion or pixels, a replica of what is presented in the click of a shutter, the media of photography has the complexity of being both subjective and objective. Generally, photographers are defined by a work created in an instant. However, what if a photographer desires to preserve more than in instant? What if they want to present 24 hours compressed into a single two-dimensional image? What if they want to examine and redefine the relationship that photographers have with the idea of time itself? These are the challenges that have occupied Stephen Wilkes in his “Day to Night” series of photographs for the last decade.

Stephen Wilkes’ “Day to Night” photographs transcend time. They embrace places and show a larger and fuller dimensionality. His search for an original way to show the passage of time was inspired through a collage of multiple photographs. This lead to the challenge of finding a way of integrating the passage of time, as well as the events that transpired within a complete day in a location. In order to create photographs from this series, each final work incorporates multiple photographs spanning the light to the dark and the stages in between. From over 1000 pictures that he has taken with a high-resolution camera, Wilkes culls his final selection to 100 pictures or less that reveal events and interesting aspects of the shoot. He creates a time line vector indicating the chronology of time, and painstakingly layers in disparate elements that have spanned the day. He finds beauty, visual poetry and often romance in the world he so carefully observes, shifting our observation from a particular moment to that of a larger and more complex experience.

“Photographing a single place for up to 36 hours becomes a meditation. It has informed me in a unique way, inspiring deep insights into life’s narrative, and the fragile interaction of humanity within our natural and constructed world” Stephen Wilkes.

Stephen Wilkes started his career as a street photographer. He has taken his passion for observation 50 to 60 feet in the air. He painstakingly researches sights, often taking a year or longer to coordinate and gain permission to access the sights he wants to photograph from. His composite images are a reification of time itself. In Wilkes’ “Day to Night” photographs, we are presented with a richer and more complex understanding of the fullness of his chosen locations. Time coalesces and often brings a poetic, romantic, and even nostalgic element to the picture.

Stephen Wilkes has created a unique voice in this series by broadening our understanding of what a photograph has the potential to be. He has found a way to expand our understanding of time and place. His photographs are dynamic with the energy of the events of a micro world integrated, highlighted, and balanced so that our experience of viewing his photographs is totally unique. His work has been the subject of a great deal of critical attention and has been exhibited internationally, with a Taschen monograph that is now a collectors item.

Stephen Wilkes’ photographs have shifted their emphasis from cityscapes to examinations of natural habitats and wildernesses. This exhibition also features some of Francesca Piqueras’ recent photographs which investigate the push and pull that man has exerted on the land and sea. Piqueras’ works, featured on the top floor of the gallery, become a living and breathing documentation of the Anthropocene and the radical shift in the balance of nature.

The idea of the Anthropocene is that it marks the first time in nature’s historic timeline in which human activities have been the prime motivators for the changing environmental impact on the earth. Her photographs show the forces of a dynamic instability and the “influence of man on the landscape, on its environment, on nature, and its vital space.” Although she does not show human beings in her photographs – their presence is suggested by the forces they collectively have asserted on the balance of natural forces. A tipping point has been reached in the land, the air, and the sea and as humans endeavor to try to mine the resources from this Earth, their activities have unleashed a new dynamic that is quickly altering the world as we have known it.

“What I am interested in,” says Piqueras, “is what man builds in his environment, what he does with it, so this is, in effect, an environmental theme in the sociological sense rather than the biological.”

The visual dialogue of man’s influences on landscapes and seascapes remain as a continuous theme throughout the work of Francesca Piqueras. Her photographs ultimately deal with the effects of industrialization and the resultant transformation of the environment. The darkly poetic yet cinematic and elegant photographs push the viewer to confront rather unsettling realities. The work of Piqueras is featured and has been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries, such as the Eretz Israel Museum, Tev Aviv, Israel, Palazzo Ducale di Massa, Massa, Italy and Beijing World Art Museum, Beijing, China. Today the artist is working on several other projects based upon our post-industrial world.