“Objects in Perspective: Collaboration by Aspen Hochhalter & Natalie Abrams” opens Thursday with a reception from 5-7 p.m. in Pease Gallery. See you there!

In a new effort to raise funds for educational programming for the galleries, we now encourage our exhibiting artists to bring in small art pieces to sell during their shows

Aspen Hochhalter is showing smaller prints of her huge photographs on view, and selling them for $25.These were made with an antique technique called Wet Plate Collodion, which involved priming a glass plate with a chemical solution and capturing an image of a subject by exposing the plate to light, thereby creating an “ambrotype.” Aspen’s ambrotypes of these and the larger images are also on view in the exhibition. They capture minute details in Natalie Abrams’ encaustic wax sculptures, also on view.

(these, as well as small encaustic sculptures by Natalie Abrams, will also be available during our Friends & Family Market!)

Take a look:

“Objects in Perspective: Aspen Hochhalter and Natalie Abrams” is now on view in Pease Gallery.

Information
September 15 – November 6
Reception October 2, 5-7 pm
Hochhalter Lecture – Thursday, October 9, 3:00 p.m. in Pease Auditorium
Abrams Lecture – Wednesday, October 22, 3:00 p.m. in Pease Auditorium

Statement

The sense of history and landscape is almost palpable where Aspen Hochhalter and Natalie Abrams grew up, in the areas surrounding Colorado Springs, Colorado. Dusty red mesas and lined strata broken by pine forest and electric red scrub oak where one periodically finds fields of scorched and carbonized earth. Kitsch curio shops filled with rusty antiques and photo studios where people dress in period clothing to pose before a bellows camera where you too can look like the sheriff, a proper lady, or a not- so-proper lady.

This collaboration explores the transformation of form into space by the manipulation of perspective and scale through the photographic lens. As these elements shift in relation to each other our sense of scale is lost and the photographs cease to present merely form, but coalesce into ambiguous “scapes” that exude a sense of place, landscape and history. During the nineteenth century, wet plate collodion—one of the earliest photographic techniques—was used to document the exploration of the new frontiers in the American west; exotic, surreal landscapes emerged that challenged and expanded our experience of space and land. In this joint project, Hochhalter uses the wet plate collodion photo process to photograph Abrams’ sculptural works, at times drawing out the very grains of ochre pigment suspended in a wax based medium.The imperfections of voids and brush lines add to the sense of time. The monolithic presentation of these images enhance the connotations of ambiguous landscape that not only reference the cliff faces, monuments, mountains and river beds of the west, but also the bluffs and valley floors of the unexplored ocean floor.

Aspen Hochhalter attempts to see beyond the surface of an object, distorting the original and definitive reference. The use of antique photo processes, adding to the imperfections or details, further manipulates perspective and scale as seen through her photographic lens.

Natalie Abrams’ work examines suspended moments in time; the physical and textural experience of those moments, the delicate beauty of our surroundings and the difficulty of preserving the present. An environmentalist, Abrams has created a unique method of manipulating wax medium and other natural materials to create her highly sculptural works referencing natural habitats and landscape.

This exhibition will display a series of large scale (44” x 90”) images taken by Hochhalter as well as original sculptural works by Abrams. The photographs will be wall hung alongside their original glass negative plates, whereas the sculptural works will take the form of freestanding long, thin slices of landscapes installed flat on low height plinths, where the viewer is looking down on the object as one would upon an architectural model. The juxtaposition of the placement, as well as of the intricate, at times vibrant wax sculptures in front of the large scale, monochromatic photographs, while referencing each other will also create a dynamic contrast.

Thanks for joining us at Heather Freeman’s closing reception, which followed her lecture last Thursday (8/28). We are sad to see this show go!