Exhibit:
August 6-31, 2008
Opening Reception
Thursday, August 7, 2008
6-9pm
Artist Talk
Sunday, August 17, 2pm
VIEWPOINT GALLERY
Open Wednesday to Sunday 12-5pm
1272 Barrington Street
Halifax, NS, Canada
Living Sculpture
Gallery
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Fine Art Photography by Joseph Szostak
In the fall of last year, I traveled with another Halifax photographer for a photo shoot at the Great Dunes National Park located near Creston, Colorado. Although I once lived in Boulder, I had no idea back then that 5.5 hours south of Denver, at the Great Dunes National Park, one could find the tallest sand dunes in North America.
The Great Sand Dunes are a fantastic environment, an elemental landscape made up of shifting and transforming symmetries. Behind the Dunes tower the purple Sangre de Cristo Mountains, in the other direction loom the San Juan Mountains. Between the two, the San Luis Valley stretches over an area roughly the size of Connecticut.
The Dunes appear almost alive. Their colour and even their shape seem to change with the arc of the sun and the variations of the weather. On one of our first mornings a huge storm blackened the sky, drenching us in rain. On another day, a sandstorm rose up, tearing ferociously at every exposed piece of skin.
While the Sandre de Cristo range evokes a masculine presence—rugged and monumental—the Dunes seem primordially feminine. The beauty of curves, soft folds, aeolian structures rounded and full. Some of these photographs look at the cascading patterns of the Dunes in small slices, while others try to give a sense of their vast magnitude and the open space they create.
Dunes are being created by something invisible—the wind. In some of these pictures you can see the presence of the wind in the flight of sand through the air, or in the pattern a blade of grass makes as its tip traces a history of its motion into the sand.
Living in the Maritimes, I’ve naturally been attracted to photographing nature. Although I love the sea, my strongest association is with the mountains. I spent a particularly vivid part of my youth at Mt. Shasta, a majestic volcanic peak in northern California. It’s there I first learned to develop B&W prints. So it was especially thrilling to return to the mountains in this photographic expedition to Colorado. I hope this exhibit conveys some of that spirit.
Photography has been my way of discovering elegance in the everyday world. I'm inspired by beauty, by sparse architectural lines, by the ruggedness and richness of the natural world, and by reflections, abstractions and the painterly quality of light on surfaces. These are qualities I try to convey in my photographs.
Joseph Szostak |
