Consent to Gravity

PROVIDENCE, R.I.

:In honor of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Frederick Sommer, the RISD Museum is collaborating with the Newport contemporary ballet company Island Moving Co. to celebrate the artist's inventive and haunting work.

Sommer taught in RISD's photography department in 1973 and returned to lecture and exhibit in 1984. "Consent to Gravity," on view at the museum through May 22, highlights his photographs from the 1940s through the 1960s - the work for which he is best known - along with a selection of his unusual musical scores.

The exhibition will be complemented by a landmark choreographic interpretation of these scores, also titled "Consent to Gravity," which will be performed by Island Moving Co. at the RISD Auditorium on Saturday, March 19. and Sunday, March 20.

Sommer (1905-1999) was a singular figure in Twentieth Century photography. His receptiveness to chance encounters, as well as his studied analytical methods, led to an enormous range of approaches to picture making within a relatively small body of work.

Sommer took up photography in the 1920s for use in his landscape design practice. In 1938 he began to use a large-format camera for artistic exploration, creating unsettling images of animal carcasses and butchered chicken parts that referenced the horrors of World War II.

By the early 1940s, he was photographing the Arizona desert as horizonless fields of minute detail, and from the mid-1940s through the 1950s he assembled deteriorated found objects and printed papers in mysterious figurative compositions that existed only long enough to be recorded by the camera. He further pushed photography into the world of imagination with cameraless and out-of-focus imagery. His photographs were embraced by the Surrealists and widely collected by museums across the nation and abroad.

Hours are Tuesday-Sunday, 10 am to 5 pm; third Thursday of the month until 9 pm. Admission is $8. For information, 401-454-6500. The museum is at 224 Benefit Street.