Saturday 30th April to Saturday 9th July 2016, Monday to Saturday 11am to 6pm
Stills (Gallery) 23 Cockburn Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1BP
This is an odd but welcome addition to the Festival of Architecture exhibitions, events, etc, running over 2016. I am really not sighted on modern photography at all. Accordingly on first looking through the photos, a large array of black and white photos of non descript bits of land, mounds of earth, etc, I was really wondering whether I was stupidly missing something deeply profound about each single image.
There is a short five minute video that is well worth a look and my take on what Baltz (the photographer) was saying, was that by taking photos he was really seeking to put a frame on something to draw attention to it. Sometimes it might simply be a pleasing arrangement of architectural details or some nondescript land pared back of anything of interest.
Whereas the work of the French landscape artist Claude Lorrain created an ideal of beauty that was then translated by landscape gardeners into created landscapes, Baltz had taken the existing banality of our surroundings, framed it, and challenged us to see the beauty in it what we have ourselves created.
The exhibition also features some minimal art pieces, to parallel and perhaps offer their own commentary. In fact these pieces are so minimal as to be quite unobtrusive, there were aluminium floor panels (illustrated) and perhaps something that looked like ducting, or was that really just ducting, I am not sure.
While no single item here carried a great deal of meaning, as a whole the effect was contemplative and thought provoking.
No comments:
Post a Comment