Rob Holt and Leslie Bartlett at the New England School of Art and Design

I've been pretty busy lately. This is my cover story for the May 2004 issue of artsMEDIA. Images of the artwork are available here and here. There's also a companion article on Bartlett below that I did for the same issue, as part of their "Artist at Work" series.

The Land Abstracted: Rob Holt and Leslie Bartlett
New England School of Art and Design
75 Arlington Street
Boston
May 18-June 15

Rob Holt and Leslie Bartlett take photographs that are fragments of a place. These cropped selections create ambiguities of space and depth, especially in relation to the viewer. Think of Ansel Adams' expansive sublime crossed with Paul Strand's close-up images that verge on abstraction. Both Holt and Bartlett are making work that registers simultaneously as representation and abstraction, an active metamorphosis highlighted by their mutual choice of stone as subject matter.

Set in the main space of the gallery, Rob Holt's show "Abstractions in Sandstone" features 30 photographs, all scenes from locations near Page, Arizona. These images, taken with a 35 mm Minolta camera and printed from color slide film after hi-res digital scans, have been created in 18 by 27 inch format on a large-format inkjet printer and then plaque-mounted on pressed board. Holt divides them into three place-centered groupings which correspond to the 3 walls of the gallery space: the slot canyons, Paria plateau, and the now-dry bed of Lake Powell.

Holt's images are awe-inspiring views of the west as romantic sublime, in the tradition of Adams and many of the Arizona Highways photographers who have been influenced by him. The photos are also haunted by the influence of Georgia O'Keefe, in the oddly floral forms that emerge in Holt's rock abstractions and also in the distinctively western color palette he employs. Images such as "Delicate Fins 2" depict luscious streaks of purple, red, orange and tan that upon closer inspection reveal themselves as ridges on a rock face.

Perhaps the most moving images here are Holt's slot canyon photos such as "Color Cascade" and "Figure Ground." The dramatic colors in these images, caused by natural light bouncing off canyon walls and reflecting bits of mica embedded in the rock, lend these western scenes an otherworldly quality. Add to this Holt's ability to capture texture and frame the image , and we experience a strange transmutation that makes rock feel as delicate as fabric.

But if Holt is concerned with finding the sublime in faraway places, Leslie Bartlett's show "Chapters on a Quarry Wall" in the adjacent gallery locates the exotic in details right under his nose, in the town of Rockport, MA where he recently lived for 35 years. This show features 10 vertical-format images of the walls of Rockport's Flatledge Quarry, taken with a G2 Canon Powershot. Assembled each as montages of several photographs in one, these dramatic 12 by 34 inch pieces defy our viewing habits and force us to read the image downward, as one would a drawing on a Chinese scroll. It is physically impossible for the eye to take in the whole image at once, not only because of the vertical format but also because the shallow space of the images forces us to read the surface patterns of the rock as abstraction.

Unlike Holt's natural sublime, in Bartlett's photographs we are reminded of the presence of human intervention in nature. In "V" and "IX" for example, one can clearly see marks where the drill bit dug into this quarry wall in the course of building a keystone bridge for a nearby highway. We are essentially looking at a surface that is entirely manmade, yet paradoxically blooming with foliage in some seasons, as in "VI." The choice of "Chapters" is evocative in this sense, because it emphasizes the notion of scenes from the same physical location captured over the course of time, the changing play of light and life across the face of an unchanging surface.

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Artist at Work: The Augmented Eye

Photographer Leslie Bartlett finds inspiration in the imagery of his town and the surrounding areas in Cape Ann. Though Bartlett originally worked in the field of graphic design, he has been a photographer for 6 years now. It was his work with computers that first led him to art, in a marketing job where he made VR panoramas for websites. This experience created in Bartlett a fascination with technology as extension of the senses. "When you look at a panorama, there's a sense of more than what the eye can take in," He says.

For the recent series "Chapters on a Quarry Wall," Bartlett used Apple Quicktime VR and Photoshop to create panoramas by montaging as many as 3-5 images into a single photograph. These works combine his interest in panorama with the genre of still-life. "But unlike arranging a bowl of fruit," the artist says, "my variables are in terms of the time of year, the foliage, and the weather conditions."

So despite the use of technology, taking the photograph and getting the right physical conditions are still an important part of Bartlett's process. For these recent photos, he spent several months free-climbing down into a Rockville quarry throughout various seasons (sometimes walking across the frozen ice). Because of the photographer's location and viewpoint, these are images not otherwise available to the eye of the casual passerby. But soon they may literally be unseeable. If a local piece of legislation goes through, the whole area Bartlett photographed may soon be underwater.

Working out of a mostly-computerized studio in his house, the artist finds that paper choice is also a crucial part of his process. "In some ways, I think this is the greatest area of experimentation," he says. "There are many types of paper, and they affect the emotional read of the image. By test-printing, I get a sense as to which will allow me to convey the intended effect" Rather than seeing himself as strictly a documentarian, Bartlett treats his medium as a painter would: he begins with artifice and creates from it scenes that feel true.