Heightened Perspectives Opens at Projective Eye Gallery September 16
Opening on September 16 at the Projective Eye Gallery at UNC Charlotte Center City is Heightened Perspectives, a collaborative two-part exhibition presented by the UNC Charlotte College of Arts + Architecture & The Light Factory. In a time when mass imagery is more often a quick superficial surveillance of self and other, the power of perspective, context, and a deeper interpretation has never been more needed. Perspective has always been a means to intensify an image, raising issues about vantage point and voyeur. Through experimental film and immersive optical installation, this two-part exhibition offers the idiosyncratic heightened perspectives of two-lens based artists, Phil Solomon and Ethan Jackson.
Heightened Perspective 1
Projective Eye Gallery at UNC Charlotte Center City
September 16 – November 30
Opening Reception, September 16, 6-8 pm
Experimental filmmaker Phil Solomon’s American Falls, originally commissioned by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, blends found footage from documentary and Hollywood film with film of the rushing waters of Niagara Falls, creating a powerful metaphoric landscape. Projected on the 22-foot gallery wall, American Falls celebrates moving reticulation around gesture, both human and natural.
Ethan Jackson works with light, optics, and images, producing immersive optical installations and still and moving imagery about place and perception. His site-specific optical installation at Projective Eye will create a wall of subtle light on the gallery window facing 9th Street. Pools of color, each reflecting aspects of the world outside the gallery, will build a complex and ever-evolving natural mural, in real time.
Heightened Perspective 2
The Light Factory
November 18 – January 6, 2017
Opening Reception, November 18, 6-9 pm
Installation artist and photographer Ethan Jackson will project video into the front and back rooms of The Light Factory exhibition space, transforming all four walls into slowly moving landscapes. Phil Solomon’s experimental film Twilight Psalm II: “Walking Distance” will bisect these two video installations. Reviewing the film for The New York Times in 1999, Stephen Holden wrote, “Mr. Solomon’s supremely lyrical ‘Psalm’ imagines a movie extracted from a rusted medieval film can left over from the Bronze Age. What unfolds on the screen suggests an ancient abstract painting encrusted with rust and sand, behind which human faces half-form and disappear, suggesting eons of time and civilizations rising and falling.”
The opening receptions on September 16 and November 18 will feature performances by Fresh Ink, a new-music ensemble of professional musicians. Inspired by the concept of “heightened perspective,” two local composers – John Allemeier of UNC Charlotte and Zach Zebow of Queens University of Charlotte – have composed new works using the same eight instruments as Dvořák’s Serenade for wind instruments, cello, and double-bass in D minor, Op. 44. Allemeier’s Jezebel and Zubow’s The Raven will be performed along with the Dvořák octet.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Ethan Jackson has been a professor of photography and new media at Johnson State College in Vermont and Reed College in Portland, Oregon. His recent public art can be seen at the Colorado Public Library. Jackson has been an artist in residence at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Ucross, Djerassi, the Wurlitzer Foundation, Yaddo, Vermont Studio Center, and Virginia Center for Creative Arts, among others. Notable projects have taken place at Gallery Sugata, Kyoto, Japan; Duke University, NC; PASEO-Taos, NM; and the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historic Park, VT; with exhibitions in France, Germany, Tokyo, and throughout the US.
Rated as one of America’s top 10 experimental filmmakers by the Village Voice, Phil Solomon has been included in New York’s Whitney Biennial of American Art twice. His films have been screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, and at many other prestigious national and international festivals and venues. Solomon won a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1993) and The Thatcher Hoffman Smith Award (2007), as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Creative Capital Foundation. His films are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, among many other institutions. His digital video work can be seen in Grand Theft Auto.
A City on Its Side by Sharon Dowell
UNC Charlotte Center City
September 16, 2016 – July 1, 2018
Commissioned by the College of Arts + Architecture in tandem with Heightened Perspectives is a new mural by local artist and UNC Charlotte alumna Sharon Dowell. Seen through the window on the wall facing Brevard Street, A City on Its Side is Dowell’s creative response to the political turmoil in our state. The vibrant mural depicts two Charlotte cityscapes, both turned on their sides: Charlotte in the 1900s and the skyline of today, perspectives on struggles past and present.