Kansas

From the Curator’s Statement. Courtesy of the Wichita Art Museum.

Wichita-born artist Stuart Allen tests the boundaries of landscape imagery in this series of photographs. Each artwork is a distilled from a digitally scanned photograph of Kansas. “The source images are reminders of my youth in Wichita and the open landscapes of Kansas: throwing snowballs with my brother in our front yard, sailing on Cheney Lake, driving out west during college road trips,” Allen notes.

Cropped and magnified to reveal only a few pixels from the original scan, the artist strives to maintain a sense of the original photograph. “While a nine-pixel photograph may render a decidedly abstract version of its subject, it remains a photograph: a record of light, in one place, in one time,” Allen states.

The resulting images are beautiful chromatic compositions with gentle color shifts that poetically invoke not just the moment of the image’s capture but also the distinctive landscape of the Midwest. “Though they no longer refer to the pictorial character of landscape,” the artist comments, “they do speak to the specific color and quality of light present in one moment, in one particular place on Earth.”

For more information about this series click here for an artist’s statement.