Feature Articles


January Issue 2002

Halsey Gallery in Charleston, SC, Features Works by Maggie Taylor & Jerry N. Uelsmann

The William Halsey Gallery at the College of Charleston's School of the Arts in Charleston, SC, will host an exhibition entitled Points of Intervention, featuring the manipulated photographs of Maggie Taylor and Jerry N. Uelsmann from Jan.10 - Feb. 16, 2002.

Each of these internationally acclaimed artists intervene at a different point in the photographic process to produce their enigmatic images. Taylor will lecture about her work on Jan.10 at 4pm in the gallery. She will conduct a demonstration of her digital imaging techniques in the gallery at 2pm on Jan. 11. Uelsmann will speak about his photography also on Jan. 11 at 4pm in room 309 of the Simons Center.

Uelsmann's photographs are as immediately recognizable as they are visually potent. He has become one of the most successful photographic artists of the last thirty years and remains a pioneer within the field. Uelsmann's work has been exhibited in over 100 solo exhibitions and his photographs are in the permanent collections of many major museums worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Chicago Art Institute, the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, the National Museum of American Art in Washington, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Utilizing only traditional darkroom technique. (and up to eight enlargers), Uelsmann manipulates and combines familiar images and landscapes into unfamiliar creations that conjure up notions of surrealism, mysticism and even Jungian archetypes. It has been said of his work, "The visually plausible but philosophically impossible situations presented in Jerry Uelsmann's photographs contradict the essential information we have come to expect from photographs. By subverting the currency of literal fact, Uelsmann releases us from the constraints of photography's mimetic function. No longer burdened by representation, we naturally return to our internal, nonlinear faculties of thought and feeling to savor the Inexpressible resonance of his... visions."

Maggie Taylor

From a technological standpoint the work of Maggie Taylor could not be more different from that of Uelsmann. For the past five years she has been using a flatbed scanner instead of a traditional camera to record and interpret collected objects, text and images. These are combined through digital manipulations, as well as being physically constructed on the scanner. The resulting inscrutable creations of Taylor have a distinct resonance with the photographs of Uelsmann. Also widely exhibited and collected, Taylor's work is beginning to gain national and international acclaim. When describing her unique tableaux Taylor suggests, "the images work on two levels: they are about these specific objects, yet they also invite reverie or recollections. I like to think that the objects are obviously symbolic, but not symbolically obvious."

The exhibition is co-sponsored by the Visual Arts Club at the College of Charleston.

For more info check our SC Institutional Gallery listings or call 843/953-5680.

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