Splendid folk painting and carving decorate a Seventeenth Century sailor’s chest with interior lid painting from the Eighteenth Century.
NEW YORK CITY – The Edward Carter Gallery in SoHo will show new work from Easton, Md., photographer Gunnar Plake. His work will be featured in a solo exhibition of Western landscapes entitled, “Passages of Time,” September 5 through October 5. A reception for the artist will be held at the gallery on Thursday, September 5, from 6 to 8 pm.
Plake has lived his entire life with a heightened awareness of the paying out, the passage, of time. This preoccupation with the lack of enough time has been the common theme in his photography for more than 25 years, and has led him to endeavor to imbue his images with the optimal quality of time — to strive to create the perception of motion within a single frame.
For Plake, the landscape of the American West presents a perfect counterpoint to his own learned sense of space and time. “Most of my life has been spent in the East, in cities, and at a frenetic pace, where there is never enough time. For me, the term ‘Western’ connotes the extreme: extreme scale, extreme distance, extreme light, extreme quiet, and most especially, extreme timelessness; where nature is not tainted by man and its creations that fix one’s place in time.”
Plake’s technique involves moving the camera during exposure, creating a stroke. This enables him to include more information in the image than if the camera were held still.
“The ‘piling on’ of data makes it possible for me to expand the expressive possibilities of the photographic medium. Colors can be stretched and blended; out of the raw material of the landscape, textures can be perceived, then amplified,” said Plake.
Plake has resided on Maryland’s eastern shore for the past ten years. His work has been the subject of many recent shows and is in the collections of The Brooklyn Museum and The Denver Art Museum.
The Edward Carter Gallery is at 560 Broadway (at the corner of Prince Street), fourth floor. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10 am until 6 pm. The gallery is open late on Thursdays by appointment only. For information, 212-966-1933.
