JUROR’S STATEMENT

Selecting the photographs for the 23 Sandy Gallery’s “Shelter” exhibition took me back to my aesthetic roots. Before being an editor and writer, I took photographs – pretty seriously for over a decade. A bit schizophrenic, my influences stretched from Lewis Baltz to the Starn Twins. I loved the factuality of the photograph but relished the opportunity to create exuberant fictions within it. My eye and intellect were most captivated by the deep, ethical commitment and visual precision of someone like Robert Adams, but my hands and emotions as a maker had little hope of being so disciplined. I did everything from 4-by-5 desert landscapes to multiply exposed gum bichromate prints. And by the end of my decade-long obsession with the medium, I was making 12-foot-long prints made from pinhole photographs taken of constructions built out of photographs I had taken of vast desert landscapes and downtown construction sites. In short, my interest in photography’s architecture led me to turn photographs into architecture.

I don’t know if that makes me uniquely qualified to jury a show called “Shelter.” But it does tell you something about my interests and biases. When I look at a photograph, I try to understand what the maker wants to say about the world, but I always try to feel the often messier, conflicted artistic impulses underneath because, in so many cases, it’s the intuitions rather than the intentions that better stand the test of time.

Randy Gragg
Juror

 

GALLERY STATEMENT

23 Sandy Gallery is pleased to present “Shelter: A Juried Exhibition of Contemporary Photography.” At a time when the concept of “shelter” is very much on all of our minds, we feel these images explore, with insight and much needed humor, the myriad definitions of the word. Shelter is one of our most basic human needs—at once both physical and psychological. We derive great pride from the shelter we build. We seek shelter from the elements, from the storm, from harm. How can shelter be interpreted visually given its myriad manifestations?

We are grateful to all of the artists who submitted work for this show. There was an amazing diversity of images and we celebrate every artist’s visual voice.

Gratitude also goes out to Randy Gragg, the juror for Shelter.  As the editor of Portland Spaces magazine I appreciate his time and guidance in selecting images for this show. Randy is one of our city’s great thinkers about architecture, art, photography and “shelter” in general. As a gallery owner I am always delighted when a juror and I seem to be of one mind when it comes time to actually sit down and choose images. Thank you Randy for accommodating my fondness for the sentimental and helping those images fit within the context of the show.

Laura Russell
Co-Juror