|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Recent Acquisitions Releases Press Release Archive |
Tyler Museum of Art Opens New Exhibition of Local Photographer's Work Tyler, TX— Photographer and Tyler native Robert Langham is the most recent Texas artist to be featured in a one-man exhibition at the Tyler Museum of Art. Robert Langham: Intimate Expanse features 33 black and white photographs taken over a 20-year period (1984-2004) that focus on just two locales—Smith County, Texas and Shiprock, New Mexico. Langham draws interesting parallels between the two very different environments; the intimacy of the hills and woods of East Texas and the wide,expansive frontier of New Mexico. The photos in the exhibition focus on the similarities of the landscapes that aren’t apparent without introspection—like the consistency of seasons, clouds, shadow and light. “I didn’t photograph in the West for a long time because I couldn’t get that intimate connection I was used to capturing in my photographs of East Texas,” Langham said, “but it just kept beating in my head there had to be a way to make those visions seem as close and personal as those I was shooting here. I kept working and working with it, going back and looking at the same places (at Shiprock), but from different perspectives and at different times of the year, and then it just happened. I was just barely out of my truck, so close to what I was familiar with that the shadow of the truck was in the photo, and that brought in the intimate connection to a landscape that can seem very separate and far away.” Langham said he has concentrated for many years on East Texas photography because no other photographer has been active enough in this area to change the way we look at the natural world around us. He said that is also one reason he avoided shooting the American West for some time, because it had already been made so familiar to others by the works of such famed photographers as T.H. O’Sullivan (1840-1882) and Ansel Adams (1902-1984). “It’s very hard to make a photograph that’s not someone else’s photograph,” Langham noted. “I’m driven by the natural world; I don’t want it to be what someone else sees or thinks it looks like. I’ve always wanted to be able to really see the world in front of my face.” Tyler Museum of Art Curator Ken Tomio commented on other similarities between the extremely different environments of New Mexico and East Texas as depicted in Langham’s work. “The intimate space in either case is far from closed-in. It is flung wide-open to the temporal expanse of celestial proportions, and his landscapes are always stamped with the images of the passing of the ‘celestial clock’ in the form of sweeping shadows, rushing clouds, or the streaking stars and the moon,” Tomio noted. Robert Langham: Intimate Expanse will be on exhibit at the Tyler Museum of Art’s North Gallery through April 17 and is funded by CPS Medical Inc., Satterwhite Log Homes and Dianne and James Holton, MD. Other activities planned in connection with the exhibition include a “First Friday Tour” with descriptive lecture of Langham’s work by Tomio March 4 at 11:30 a.m., and a Digital Photography Workshop March 5 from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.. The First Friday Tour is free to members and one guest, with costs to non-members of $3. The Digital Photography Class is for adults at a cost of $15 for TMA members; $25 for non-members and class size is limited to the first 12 reservations.To attend either event, please call the Museum at (903)595-1001 for reservations. The exhibition is open to the public for free admission (donations accepted) during regular TMA hours Tuesday–Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Other exhibitions currently on display at the Museum, which is located at 1300 S. Mahon adjacent to the Tyler Junior College campus, are a traveling exhibition by Austin-based collage artist Lance Letscher: Books and Parts of Books 1996-2004 and a new installation of part of the TMA’s permanent collection, Thirty-three Years of Collecting at the Tyler Museum of Art. |