Charting a two year journey to the polar regions of the Atlantic basin, the exhibition True, from renowned international photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper, presents new works from the series, The World's Edge - an ongoing work that seeks to map the extremities of the land and islands that surround the Atlantic Ocean.
For the past 30 years, the artist has travelled to some of the most isolated and far-flung locations across the globe, making images with his 19th century Agfa camera and specially made photographic plates.
The World's Edge was initiated in 1990. Each work begins as a location found on a map, researched and tracked down, and after often difficult journeys by air, sea and land, only one photograph is made per location on Cooper's arrival. The World’s Edge began with trips to chart Europe and Africa, and the last outstanding journey along the Atlantic coast of North America from Labrador through to Cape Cod and on to Key Largo is planned for spring 2010.
The 79 works in this exhibition include images made in the North and South poles, at the northern most land points of Norway and Greenland, and the most northerly point of the Antarctic Peninsula, Prime Head, which has had fewer human visitors than the Moon.
The exhibition True required some of the toughest journeys for Cooper to date: over three months at sea, sailing into areas marked as 'uncharted dangers' - territories where rescue teams never venture and in which insurance companies are not able to provide cover - and treacherous weather conditions, including extreme storms caused by the El Nino and being snowed into the South Pole for 13 consecutive days.
Constructed only and always of the landscape, Cooper's images are devoid not only of figures and animals, but all human trace. Using the chiaroscuro technique - the use of long exposures and low lighting to create distinct areas of light and darkness - the resulting images describe the darkness of cold water, white voids of fog, submerged rocks icebergs and the geology of rocks.
Bill Fontana Silent Echoes
'Silent Echoes', a new audio and video work by Bill Fontana, explores the sounds of five famous Buddhist Temple bells in Kyoto when they are not ringing. Vibration sensors were attached to the bells and acoustic microphones were placed inside of their resonant cavities. They measured and recorded how these bells are in fact ringing all the time in response to the ambient sounds of the environment. In the context and psychology of Buddhist culture the idea of a bell ringing all the time is a powerful metaphor. There is a famous mediation in which one strikes a bowl shaped bell and if one's attention is unwavering one experiences that this bell does not stop ringing as long one is listening.
"...when a bell rings it is only the sound of the bell listening to the sound of the bell. Or to put it another way it is the sound of yourself ringing. This is the moment of enlightenment."
('The Three Pillars of Zen' by Phillip Kapleau)
In 'Silent Echoes', Fontana has used modern measurement technology to reveal a hidden world of perpetual acoustic energy within an apparently dormant bell. The bell is always listening and is a physical mediation on the world around it. These bells are portals to the acoustic energy around them and they have never been silent. This idea of music being a state of mind tuned into the music going on all time around us has been a strong interest in all of Fontana's work with live sound sculptures for the past 40 years. These temple bells are a physical analogy to the idea of music as continuous listening. John Cage many times said that 'music is continuous and listening is intermittent'. In using the term sound sculpture to describe his work, Fontana has defined sculpture as a way to make physical some state of the human condition, therefore a sound sculpture makes the act of listening in a musical way continuous and physical.
In 'Silent Echoes', besides the high resolution sound recordings of the bells, a high definition video camera viewed these bells so that in this video installation the audience gazes at a static, nearly life size projection of the bells while being immersed in its resonating echoes of the world around it.
