NYAB Event - Carolyn Marks Blackwood "The Wind Blows Through My Heart"

Carolyn Marks Blackwood "The Wind Blows Through My Heart"

Alan Klotz Gallery

This event has ended.

Carolyn Marks Blackwood makes deceivingly simple photographs. They are mostly of a single subject matter: Ice, Birds, Fish, Clouds...things we all know and even have a fondness for. But these familiar things are engaged in unusual activities which actually redefine their characteristics and even some of their mystery. They certainly redefine our perception of the spaces in which we see those things in these photographs. So what seems, at first, to be a simple picture, turns out to be a rather complex visual and emotional experience.

As an example, we are shown ice breaking up on the Hudson River due to the opposing forces of tide and current. The ice shatters in jagged shards, and is propelled in patterns by the water moving swiftly below the surface. It looks dangerous as broken glass, as it swirls and collides. These collisions force the ice to rise up like teeth, piling on each other, creating a rather threatening topology of chaos. Each surface, canted this way and that, reflects the light differently, and are rendered more or less translucent by their degree of lift. They often are strangely colored by the effect of sun or sky or some other unforeseen miracle of light. The surface of the river is flat, as is the plane of the picture, yet the swirls and eddies conspire to create the illusion of landscape complete with hills and hollows and heights that seem to come together then break apart in apocalyptic disarray...one loses one's balance, and one's breath simply looking at them.

But this is a photographic thing, you cannot see it even if you were there, as I have been, standing next to Carolyn, on a cold winter's day, on that humble Rhinecliff shore, watching the ice break up dramatically, not 20 feet from where I was...but it's just ice. It first has to be translated from 3D to 2 by a camera before it becomes grand opera...specifically by Blackwood's camera, guided by her eye's way of knowing just when it's there...when it's really there.