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Two artists with highly personal approaches to the natural world and to photography are showing their work October 9th to November 10th at the The Main Gallery in Redwood City. An opening reception and dance recital will be held for: Deep Water: The Open Ocean off Gladden Spit, underwater images by Robin V. Robinson, and Landscape and Memory, Bromoil Prints by Saelon Renkes on October 13th from 4 to 7 PM. Two short dance performances will be given by special guest artist, Sri Susilowati. |
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Photographer Robin V. Robinson engages the surreal deep ocean in rare black and white images. Although all her images are technically photographs, many of them walk the borderline between painting and photography, owing to Robinson's one-of-a-kind darkroom brushwork. Robinson's new exhibit is the product of her underwater journey to an astonishing congregation of wild fish spawning at Gladden Spit in the open ocean off the coast of southern Belize. On the full moon in springtime the mass spawning of thousands of snapper turns into a "major food festival, where everyone shows up to eat, including 30 foot whale sharks" - the largest fish in the sea. The Belize government has just created a National Marine Reserve to protect this precious natural spawning aggregation - believed to be unique in all the world. Robinson, a conservation advocate, says this marine success story provoked her personal esthetic reaction and led to the work in this exhibition. In the spring this exhibition will travel to Belize for showing at the capitol and at the Marine Reserve. |
| Although Saelon
Renkes works with traditional photographic subject matter -- landscapes
and nudes --- her approach is anything but traditional. Saelon is widely
experienced in the alternative photographic processes, particularly
handcoloring, for which she is well known, exhibited and published.
Her long-standing web site has been studied by the American Civil Liberties
Union as a seminal case of freedom of artistic speech on the world wide
web. Renkes' latest work explores the 19th century bromoil process: using this almost forgotten technique to create images that evoke memories of past landscapes, childhood landscapes and ancestral landscapes. |
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Bromoil is a technically demanding process: Saelon starts with specially printed black and white photographs, which are then carefully bleached to remove most of the visible image while leaving behind a nearly invisible gelatin matrix, then an image is slowly re-created through the use of brushes and lithography inks. The result is a soft and etching-like final image. The obscure bromoil process allows remarkable manipulation of the image and, in Renkes' hands, tends to produce dreamlike landscapes divorced from hard reality. This exhibit allows the viewer to see a delicate and historical photographic process re-expressed in the hands of a sensitive observer of the natural landscape. Saelon has a website of her work at www.saelon.com. |
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