The event introduces a dedicated young art photographer from Bowing Green State University to the local community and heralds the beginning of a series of curated art exhibits hosted by Java Supreme in collaboration Visual Art in Public Spaces.

At the core of Matthew's photographic investigations of the northern Ohio landscape lies an almost anthropological fascination with what man leaves behind. The photographer's apparent subject matter is the odd, incongruous remnants and reminders of the man's presence in and passing from the natural world.  Each print testifies undeniably to the extent to which modern man and the built environment have become out-of-synch with the natural environment.

The imagery can be termed social landscape because it embodies detached ironies antithetical to the myths and ideals of the American landscape tradition.  But what lends interest to these photographs is not social comment on use of the land, but rather the ironic shift between the apparent subject matter and the content of the work which is not the landscape, but our perception of it, relation to it, and the scale or measure by which we orient ourselves in the visible world.

To fully understand this work one must be aware of its formal heresies. In spite of a formalist tenet against horizons appearing in the center of a frame, that is exactly where Gamber places them with such an intentional deliberation that he has marked a cross-section on his view finder as a guideline. Not only are his landscapes perfectly halved by the horizon line, but they will often contain elements that divide the picture plane into quarters, violating with impunity the pictorial rule of thirds. Some images defeat the square picture aesthetic entirely through arcing, darkened upper corner, a lens effect of a tilted view camera. Perspective proves elastic as the photographer questions the assumption that we live in a thoroughly mapped and measured world.

As the title of the exhibit, One Acre of String, suggests, the human perspective results in a false reading of our relation to the landscape. And by capturing these images with an 8 x 10 view camera, Gamber effectively combines the photographic strategies of the nineteenth century with a newly defined visual sensibility for the twenty-first.

Go to Barn Full of Antiques photograph collection
email me:  mgamber@udata.com
 
 
  Last modified on Tuesday, July 03 2001