Grice gallery back with old visions and new
Published 9:00 am Wednesday, December 22, 2004
The show runs through January.
A one-person show marks a return to fine art for island photographer Art Grice.
“Considerations” celebrates the return of Grice – who makes his living as an architectural photographer – to personal image-making.
The show both offers viewers 40 prints from three decades and gives the artist a rare chance to bring the past into focus, the better to chart a future path.
Circumstances conspired to stop Grice from taking pictures in the mid-1990s, he says.
“I shot a lot rambling around and so being out there exploring the world was, for me, part of the whole process of taking pictures,” he said. “So maybe it’s because of that. I wasn’t rambling around so much.”
Not having a darkroom was another factor in the hiatus Grice says, as was a two-year period during which he moved seven times.
Now the show serves the dual purpose of reintroducing both Bainbridge and Grice to the work. Preparing for the show meant reprinting, since Grice didn’t have a backlog of first-quality work.
“I tend to not have things kicking around, especially prints that are good prints,” he said. “You make three or four prints in the darkroom and one’s really good, two are OK to show and the other ones you throw in a box as a reminder. And those reminders are the ones that hang around. The rest kind of go.”
Grice scanned old negatives into the computer to make digital prints – a technology that wasn’t available when he left off.
“You can make them look like mezzotints or aquatints or etchings,” he said. “Basically you can pretty much do what you did in the darkroom – and a whole lot more.”
Even though the stored prints were not first-quality, opening the old boxes allowed Grice to revisit the aesthetic territory he had been charting, starting in the early 1970s.
“One the things I really loved, I loved the tonal possibilities of prints and I was a good printer,” Grice said, “so I would be attracted to things that would allow me to make a rich print.”
Grice’s ability to perceive and manipulate the formal elements of a picture – tone, shape, value, texture – is well in evidence in the show. Pictures with a strong directional force turn up in different guises – time exposures of a stream cleaving around a single rock; water pulled through the open fingers of a hand.
Strong, simple divisions define other prints like one in which a cultivated field meets an expanse of exposed earth in the foreground, and the two recede into a distance under a sky defined by two cloud clusters.
But, as Grice points out, his interest in the content of a print is strong; technique came first, but once Grice mastered the technical and formal elements of picture-making, he shifted the process to emphasize content.
In some pictures, content is ambiguous – a cloud evokes a visage, a land formation echoes a snake head. In one work, titled “Stream in Vancouver, B.C,” the outline of the stream, dark against the surrounding snow, resembles the supine silhouette of a woman.
“I didn’t take this picture because it was a stream,” Grice says. “I took this picture because there’s a figure in here that’s almost lifting up. It becomes a much different thing than what’s in front of the camera. So pictures like this are about where the scene was taking my mind and my imagination.”
The allusions conjure daydreams, and may even transport viewers into the scene depicted, Grice believes.
Visual associations may turn humorous, as in “Cow Map,” a close-up of a cow whose black-and-white markings become cartographic when viewed through the lens of the photographer’s sensibility.
Other images suggest a more direct narrative. Six photos are from one of the last series Grice shot during a 1989 trip to the Azores Islands, from which Grice’s grandparents emigrated.
The pictures show the weather-beaten faces of old women, their features framed in black scarves. They stand before equally battered buildings.
Now, with the work on the walls, Grice can draw some conclusions about himself as an artist.
“One of the things I realized is that I don’t photograph this world to show people and to show ourselves as bring important. I try to see the whole world; we’re just part of this world. My pictures of people are because of stories or involvements.”
Grice has not shrunk from involvement with the community he joined 22 years ago; he has served the cultural community as arts editor of Exhibition Magazine; he has headed the Bainbridge Historical Society board; and has helped shape the Cultural Element of the island’s Comprehensive Plan.
With long-time friend Gary Groves, Grice opened an alternative gallery two years ago, and now the space serves Grice himself, offering the felicitous combination of clean walls and a non-commercial venue, where the artist may gain perspective on a career in mid-stream.
“I’m going to do this every year, if I can,” he said, “I want to piece together the series I’ve been working on. I want to do them justice.”
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Art’s art
Island photographer Art Grice shows photographs old and new in “Considerations,” a one-person exhibit on view 2-5 p.m Saturdays and Sundays and by appointment through Jan. 21 at Studio Gallery, 7969 Fletcher Bay Rd. Email adgrice@earthlink.net for more information.
