吃瓜tv

Join the Fine Arts Gallery and the 吃瓜tv community for an exhibition听titled "Take Me to the River" by artist Michael Kolster.听The vernissage will take place on Wednesday March 15听and the exhibition lasts through April 8.

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About the artist

Michael Kolster is a 2013听John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in Photography and an听associate professor of art at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where he lives with his family.听 His听work听resides in a number of private听collections,听including George Eastman House International Museum of听Photography and Film,听Capital One Financial Corporation, and the Polaroid Corporation.听He has a BA in American Studies from Williams College and MFA in Photography from the听Massachusetts College of Art in Boston.

In听Take Me to the River, Michael Kolster explores the Androscoggin, Schuylkill, James, and Savannah Rivers as they emerge from two centuries of industrial use and neglect. Even as these rivers still carry the legacies of longstanding pollution in their currents and sediments, in the years following the Clean Water Act of 1972, they have become renewed and rediscovered to an extent our grandparents never could have envisioned.听

Kolster鈥檚 photographs are ambrotypes, unique glass plate positives, produced with the wet-plate photographic process in a portable darkroom Kolster set up along the banks and overlooks of these rivers. The chemical slurries that develop and fix the image on the glass plate mimic the movements of a river鈥檚 current, and the idiosyncratic qualities of Kolster鈥檚 ambrotypes harken back to the historical coincidence of the dawn of photography and the industrialization of Europe and America.听

With the reality of a changing global climate and consensus building about the extent that humans are responsible,听Take Me to the River听challenges us to set aside our blinders of wanting to see these riverine landscapes as either pure or despoiled. As the boundaries between the human and the natural are increasingly entangled, Kolster鈥檚 photographs suggest how we can reconsider places once degraded and ignored as touchstones for a new way to see the places we live in.