What’s so great about a beach photograph? There are few artistic outlets for the digital camera-clutching traveler more instantly rewarding than pointing at the red ball on the spiky, waved sea and clicking. Pure pastiche, quick beauty. No need to run a light meter or take a tripod. The stuff is art before it enters the shutter.
So there’s this show by large-format sometimes fashion photographer/videographer Renate Aller. It’s at Adamson Gallery, a gallery of some clout that has shown Chuck Close, Jim Dine and local Kelly Towles. And this artist is taking beach photographs.
Somehow, these pictures are original and stark and even – oh my – conceptual.
In Aller’s show, Fixed Coordinate, the concept is as simple and tried in the art world as the beach photo is on Flickr. The artist took the same shot from one location for weeks, but the prints here act very little like a surveyor’s document or a Project Rebirth time-lapse photo. Work such as March 19, 2005 brings what is otherwise pure nostalgia and longing (a grey sky, silver ocean) in to a study of form and gradient color. The very fact that these landscapes have been elevated moves the forms to something elemental, even Platonic. This is everyone’s beach, the work is familiar to all, even though, down to a coordinate and through an exacting lens, the work is specific.
Much can be attributed to Adamson’s in-house printing, which handled the output of the artist’s IRIS prints. Owner David Adamson has been printing digital fine art since the 1980’s and is credited as the curator of the first show of digitally produced fine art on archival material. Aller uses this to great effect to produce a breezy, salty show.
Renate Aller’s Fixed Coordinate is at Adamson Gallery until July 29th.
