Patricia
Wilder’s photographs could not have looked more at home in the Dyer Arts Center
on the RIT campus. Her exhibition, Forms
and Surfaces, is a striking presentation of nearly 90 photographs. But the
title of the exhibit could have included the space itself. The elegant
modernist space is all about forms and surfaces.
Towering
white walls are reflected in the highly polished rose marble floors. A grid of
skylights allows for lots of natural light. An all-glass wall separates the
grand gallery from another, more intimate space. And a massive “floating” gray
cement staircase looms large in the space, allowing visitors a bird’s-eye view
of the work below.
Immediately
upon entering, the visitor becomes engaged with a variety of pictures composed
of bold color, geometric forms, lines, spatial divisions, and a beautiful, even
light. As such, these photographs have become vibrant traces of nature and the
natural world gone subtly abstract.
Anchoring
the installation is the long, east wall where five large images, running from
left to right, hold court: A suspended light bulb hangs down amidst the rich
orange and red color-fields in Illumination while Offering, with an assuredly
rectilinear mantle, maintains the chromatic thread. In the center is Threshold, a bug’s-eye view of small
paving stones leading up to a stone stairway against a backdrop of warm Tuscan
yellow. Contact continues the theme
of the intoxicating orange oblivion against which the slightly skewed grid of a
rusted wire fence rests, while Inner BlueSpace completes the quintet. It’s as
if the elements of the space and the photographs have conspired to be there for
each other to provide pleasure for the viewer. All together it’s a perfect
moment in modernist design.
It
comes as no surprise to find out that Wilder and the architect of the gallery,
Robert Macon, were close friends who shared similar aesthetic sensibilities.
Indeed, Wilder’s photographs are not about the specific thing, whether it be a plant, a rock, or a building, but they are
about the photographic. They are
about how the photograph makes you feel; about a quality that allows you to see
the shapes, surfaces, textures, and colors bathed in a special light and
brought forth through the camera by a discerning and discriminating eye. Pause
for a moment and contemplate the cerulean Counterpoint or the green-blue contrapposto of Contemplation…
Like
an architect choosing specific building materials, Wilder arranges the elements
within the frame to create quiet and contemplative, albeit ambiguous, spaces.
Her decisions regarding the individual placement of photographs within Macon’s
space continue to reflect this meditation on form and design. We see this
especially in the groupings of the smaller photographs — where the
arrangement of 10 is really much more like one, big compositional grid.
In
a way, it’s almost as if the gallery becomes the image, a kind of picture of a
modernist space while Wilder’s images are the building blocks — the materials
that construct the space.
You should go if you like the spatially evocative.
Forms
and Surfaces: Patricia Wilder Photographs, through December 9 at the NTID Dyer Arts Center in the L.
B. Johnson Building, on the RIT campus. Gallery hours: Monday through Wednesday
and Friday 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Thursday 9 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., Saturday 1 to
3:30 p.m. 475-6855
This article appears in Nov 16-22, 2005.
