Walter Crump
With support from Stable Ground Boston
"I photograph anything that catches my eye. I work with traditional, digital, pinhole and Holga cameras. I merge most of my digital photographs; melding multiple images to producing photographs that hover between photography and painting. My aspiration is for my work to transcend time and leave words behind."
"When artists makes a metaphorical mark, they are hoping to provoke our imagination, hoping someone will be moved, be disturbed, be swayed, be angered, be enlightened, be horrified or even have an epiphany. Eager that the viewer will take an involuntary deep breath, notice that things have slightly shifted, eyes have opened a little wider."
About This Exhibition
RALLIES, MARCHES & PROTESTS
Photographs from various protests from Boston, San Francisco and Tehran, Iran
COVID 19 DIARIES
A photographic vision of the pandemic through out the world
4 POEMS
Poems that directly or obliquely reflect the issues of the times
“Great art is the art that gives up a few of its secrets with each generation”
A novel, a song, a dance, a film, a poem, a video, even a graphic novel, exists over time. They have a beginning and an end. We must go on a journey if we are to embrace them. On the other hand, two-dimensional art exists outside of time; it has no beginning or end. This art is always present and is always in our presence - hanging around, showing up, keeping us company, ready to give a little extra spark to our lives. Images are daydreams on our walls, in our books, on our screens, waiting to lift us, however briefly, out of our mundane world.
At one end of the spectrum, we can view work that conveys the world in a starker light - possibly a world of destruction, of nightmares, of conflict, even of terror - a world where we are introduced to the harsher realities that lie beneath a bland surface. At the other end of the spectrum, we can see a dignified world, a world of human affections and love, a romantic or redemptive one. But, we may also encounter imagined worlds never previously dreamed of, surreal worlds that maybe found closer to either end of the spectrum. Most art is neither one nor the other, but a complex blend of the realms that exist between those extremes, carrying a multiplicity of perceptions. Whatever its significance; art is infinitely varied, especially today. It challenges us, baffles us, soothes us, inspires us, and surprises us.
This is the last exhibition of the “In The Time Of Covid 19,” series. Hopefully, the series is ending at a time when forced isolation is about to come to an end and there is a new optimism for the future. Those of us who worked on this series, hope that the participating artists have conveyed and confirmed that their art enriches our lives, binds us together and helps to bring about a culture that is diverse, that respects, rewards and celebrates each individual’s uniqueness.
Image and Poetry Galleries
Artist Statement
I explore alternative ways in which cameras see the world. Trained as a painter and printmaker, I slowly gravitated to photography after being asked to teach photography at my school in 1986. Previously, I had never worked in a darkroom. Over time, as my photography skills improved, I grew fascinated with the possibilities of extending my vision through alternative ways to photograph, using both traditional cameras & handmade pinhole cameras. I soon gravitated from printmaking to photography, first working in my darkroom and later digitally.
I photograph anything that catches my eye. I work with traditional, digital, pinhole and Holga cameras. I merge most of my digital photographs; melding multiple images to producing photographs that hover between photography and painting. My aspiration is for my work to transcend time and leave words behind.
I have been especially attracted to still lives—why, I’m not sure. But, from the first time I saw, in art school, Chardin’s still life paintings of domestic objects, I was mesmerized. Later, discovering the still life painters of 16th and 17th century Northern Europe, Morandi’s sparse but luminous paintings of jars and bottles, William Bailey’s elegant ceramic “cities,” and most of all, exploring my teacher, Walter Murch’s, object paintings, I began to explore, both with digital and pinhole cameras, my own particular brand of still life. Instead capturing shiny apples, dead fish and fowl , polished copper vessels or arraigned flowers found in traditional paintings, I began to photograph the mechanical and electronic detritus of our culture. Over the years, I have collected, cherished and photographed objects discarded from the fading industrial world, fragments of defunct mechanisms, mangled circuit boards, worn gears and tangled rusting whackamadoos. Like Morandi, who arraigned and rearranged his dull crockery to create his luscious, nuanced paintings, I spend days meticulously fashioning these found objects into impermanent assemblages; once photographed, they are dismantled. I think of these impermanent structures as machines without a purpose or machines that have lost their purpose, invoking rusting metropolises or ambiguous edifices, elusive images appearing as uncertain wrecks of a dubious age, blending fiction and reality, shivery things surviving on the edge of memory.
Contact Info
Instagram: @walter.crump
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/walter.crump.5
Email: rustart@gmail.com