This is Sandy Brown Jensen, and you're listening to Viz City, KLCC's arts review program. Close your eyes, and you can almost smell the sage on the breeze and hear the rising song of a Western meadowlark. Rob Hammer's photograph "Freedom" transports you to that vast desert landscape, one of twelve riders dwarfed beneath an endless sky. Yet this powerful image is just a glimpse into the captivating exhibit "Shifting Focus" at the Maude Kerns Art Center, showcasing the work of eight photographers invited by Photography at Oregon.
These artists use their lenses to explore a remarkable range of themes, from the mythological to contemporary issues like climate change and street life humor. If you're drawn to archetypal, symbolic worlds, begin with Barbora Bakalarova's suggestive "Mythos" series. Her manipulated composites are often layered, colored, torn, and re-photographed to create dreamlike narratives.
But if gritty realism is more your style, don't miss Eric T. Kunsman's sarcastic visual humor in his street photography shots. I'll just say this - look for the dead rat.
In the West, wildfires are an ever-present danger, and photographer Tracy Barbutes doesn't just document the devastation. In her astonishing image "Firefighter," an inferno of flame assumes the size and mass of a human form, mirroring a firefighter turning away into darkness while trailing fire behind. It's as if the fire itself has a wild, primal agency.
On a much smaller scale, Sarah Grew's ethereal cyanotypes of microscopic plankton seem just as delicate as wildflowers. Yet these tiny life forms produce much of the oxygen all animals need to survive - the very foundation of life itself.
This isn't mere documentary photography; it's art that elevates and transforms the materials of our world into something finer, more profound. Through these visionary lenses, we see reality refracted into new dimensions. Don't miss this chance to shift your own focus - "Shifting Focus" runs until June 7th.
This is Sandy Brown Jensen for KLCC.
