Winter trek, Part V: Jepson Center for the Arts

Yesterday's post was devoted to classic art visitors can find in the Telfair Academy in Savannah, Ga.  The nearby Jepson Center for the Arts is devoted to contemporary art, and its contrast to Telfair is evident not only in the museum's architecture (the Telfair's classic 19th century vs. the Jepson's modernism) but also the exhibits on display.

The Jepson's exhibits were interesting, but as a photography, I found myself much more entranced by the fascinating geometric patterns I was finding inside the building. The Jepson's architecture allowed for sun to drive light through louvered glass panels, creating amazing lines, patterns and shadows at striking angles against the walls of the building. I spent a good half-hour trying to photograph everything that impressed me.

That's what you'll see mostly in this post, although I will include a few pictures of the actual artwork on display. And in the spirit of full disclosure, I should note that the photo leading off the post is actually one I took on my first visit to Savannah, in March 2017. I offer it here because I wanted to lead with an exterior shot to illustrate the modernism, and I didn't bother to do more exteriors this year.

To view a larger and sharper version of any image here, just click on the photo. To see a full gallery of images from my visit to the museum, click on the link in this sentence.

Photo geek stuff: All images were taken with my Canon 6D equpped with a Tamron 28-300 f/3.5-6.3 lens with all compositions bracketed for three different exposurs in 2/3 increments. All photos you see here were processed as single images.

Above: One exhibit at the Jepson was dedicated to art historian and Savannah native Kirk Varnedoe, the late chief curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (1988 to 2001).

Above and below: The Bird Girl statue was sculpted in Illinois in 1936 by Sylvia Shaw Judson, who made only four casts of the artwork. The most famous of the four was purchased by the Trosdal family in Savannah, which called the artwork "Little Wendy" and set it up in a family plot in Savannah's Bonaventure Cemetery. It was found there in the 1990s and photographed by photographer Jack Leigh who had been hired to find an image to use on the cover of John Berendt's best-selling book "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil." Soon after the book became a best-seller and Clint Eastwood's movie by the same name was released in 1997, curiosity seekers flocked to the cemetery to check it out. Worried that the heavy cemetery traffic might damage the now prized statue, the Trosdals loaned Bird Girl to the Telfair Museums, which first set it up in the older Telfair Academy before finally moving it to the Jepson in December 2014.

Above and next three below: Exhibits in an area I didn't spend a lot of time in, so I can't provide a lot of context or background.

Above and below: In the exhibit "Reinterpreting the Sound of Blackness," the Jepson is presenting works by the conceptual artist Paul Stephen Benjamin, described by the Jepson staff as a conceptual artist whose work uses a lot of audio/visual media as a meditation on the color black -- specifically, as an entry point into discussions of identity, race and masculinity. 

Above and next five below: Installations that were part of the electronic and op art area. The first three below were interactive mirror exhibits; if you squint hard enough, you can find me in all of them. The mirror required as much as 3 seconds to concoct the mosaic of the individual, and I used those 3 seconds to quickly focus and fire off one picture, enabling me -- in the first photo below -- to get a shot of me without the camera in my face. I held the camera still long enough to eventually get a picture of the camera in front of my face -- where you would expect to see it in a mirror image of a photographer (second photo below). 

Above: American Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) was known for his ability to mix fine art with elements of advertising and comic books to upend the traditional notions of high and low art. Still Life With Picasso by (1973) was produced for inclusion in a portfolio Hommage a Picasso (Tribute to Picasso) that featured 99 artists. 

Above: Bird Vase and Artichoke Jar (1999), a work of blown glass by American contemporary David Levi. 

Above and next three images below: I got inspired to explore different angles and perspectives of the blue vase you see in the photo above. That's why I made the three extra shots below. This glass art was transparent, so I photographed it from both sides, hence the apparent "mirror" (reverse positions) you might notice in the third photo below. The lines and patterns you see in the background of the images below make for a great transition into the various lines and patterns compositions I discussed in the story text above. Those will follow under the vase shots. 

The composition above and the two immediately below provide good reasons, I think, why a photographer should think hard composing and processing their images ... to get the most out of his/her work. The shot above is pretty close to being unedited. Something about it nagged at me, however. I knew I had an opt art conceptualization in front of me, and that, I reasoned, gave me license to push it in directions I might not ordinarily travel in my work. I played with the contrast and saturation sliders in Photoshop Elements, after which I got what you see in the first image below. I felt it transformed the composition into a more dynamic and dramatic image. And then ... again recognizing its geometric features -- lines, patterns and angles -- it occurred to me that I might create a whole different mood by converting it to monochrome and pushing the contrast a slightly more. That's what I did in the second photo below. 

Above and next three below: Here was mostly a situation where I came very close to having only one color that was non-traditional monochrome in a composition. If I had a traditional, multi-color image to work with when capturing these scenes, I could probably come close to getting what you see in the above and first two images below by manipulating spot color in Photoshop Elements, but ... it just wasn't necessary.

Above: There is only one color that is non-traditional monochrome here, too, but it's a thick, radiant sky blue in the center, and a filtered version above it, and I liked the contrast it gave me against the monochrome beams, poles, slats and shadows. So I kept it just the way it was. I do think it might be kind of cool in total monochrome, though ...

Above: Here was another situation where I pushed the contrast and saturation sliders in post-processing. I was excited by the heavy perpendicular shadows, which I felt contributed a strong element of drama to this scene.

Above and below: These were my least favorite of the lines/patterns/shadows compositions -- a bit too traditional, perhaps. But ... I thought I've give you a look/see nevertheless. 

Next up: Thomas Kinkade Gallery, Savannah

Previous posts in this series: 

Savannah at night

Savannah in daylight

American Prohibition Museum

Telfair Academy

Singer-songwriter Ellis Paul revisits the Indy Acoustic Cafe Series

I'm finding myself in "catch-up" mode once again, at least as it pertains to this blog. I'll start with the older shoot here. That was this past Saturday's installment of the long-running Indy Acoustic Cafe Series at the Wheeler Arts Community Center in the Fountain Square neighborhood of Indianapolis.

This night's featured performer was Ellis Paul, a singer-songwriter out of Boston when he first appeared in the series in 1998. Paul now makes his home in Virginia.

He ran late for Saturday's show and jokingly blamed the recent change in time from Standard to Daylight Saving. He made up for it with his music, his passion in the performance and with some pleasant stories between songs, including one that transitioned into a cover of a Roy Orbison classic, for which he borrowed sunglasses from a member of the audience to add a touch of reality to the Orbison "look." It was the Orbison tune he was singing when I took this post's lead photo (above).

He even had a couple of audience participation songs -- one in which choreography was a key component; you'll see a shot below of audience members participating in that. You'll also see, at the very end, a frame from his last song, when he left the stage and filtered out into the audience and performed "Annalee" without the benefit of microphones and stage lights. In fact, lighting right smack dab in the middle of the crowd was almost non-existent, so I did what I'd never done before on my Canon 7D -- I pushed the ISO to its maximum level, 12,800. 

At home afterward, I filtered the image through noise-reduction software in post-processing. The shot of the crowd in the front row participating in the choreography was a challenge as well. I was seated on the floor at stage right, and stage lighting drops off dramatically when it hits the crowd, even in that front row. I used aperture priority at wide open at 1250 ISO and rested the camera on my knee, using the live view function to compose and focus then waited till I saw the crowd movement would hit a freeze point before tripping the shutter. The shutter speed on the shot below was 1/6, not something I could have done ordinarily hand-held, even with my image-stabilized 70-200mm f/2.8L lens.

A full gallery of shots of Ellis Paul's show can be found in my smugmug.com gallery. For those of you who haven't dropped in there recently, I've photographed 11 shows in the Series now, so I've created a separate sub-category for them in the Music folder.
 

James House visits Indy Acoustic Cafe Series

 

Singer-songwriter James House, who co-wrote Grammy- and Song of the Year-nominated hits for country stars Martina McBride ("A Broken Wing") and Dwight Yokim ("Ain't That Lonely Yet"), visited the Wheeler Arts Center in Indianapolis' Fountain Square district on Saturday night to perform as part of the long-running Indy Acoustic Cafe series.

House scored a hit of his own -- "This Is Me Missing You" -- in 1995 (reaching No. 5 on the charts), but he's better known for his compositions recorded successfully by other artists, including McBride and Yokim (both reached No. 1) and Diamond Rio's "In a Week or Two," which reached No. 2 in 1993.

He delighted a nice-sized turnout -- including when he jokingly introduced a "medley of his hit" ("This Is Me Missing You") -- for the final show in the series for 2011. Next up in the series is Vance Gilbert on Jan. 14, 2012. These images were captured at his show.

To view a full gallery of photos from the James House performance, visit this link.