Nature/Culture Photographs by DeWitt Cheng
January 13-March 9, 2018
Reception Saturday January 13, 2018, 1:00-4:30
I never before saw a plant so full of life, so perfectly spiritual. It seemed pure enough for the throne of its Creator. I felt as if I were in the presence of superior beings who loved me and beckoned me to come. I sat down beside them and wept for joy. Could angels in their better land show us a more beautiful plant? — John Muir
Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long. — Walker Evans1
In March, 2011, I reviewed an exhibition on the life and work of the northern California naturalist John Muir: “A tireless champion for a wilderness that he believed to be divinely created, spiritually redemptive, and worthy of protection from Gilded Age laissez-faire industrial expansion, Muir saw getting back to the land at least occasionally as balm for "thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people" — a judgment shared by contemporary visitors to the Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks seeking their own "mountain baptism."2
While I as a longtime San Francisco resident, an art critic and curator, am anything but a rugged outdoorsman in the Muir mold, and largely confine my jaunts to urban and suburban fastnesses, I have found myself more and more interested in photography during the past decade or so. While I bought my first digital camera—a 4MP Canon A530—in order to make visual notes for reviewing gallery and museum shows, I found that I was seeing the everyday world more and more through eyes trained by art studies. Scenes reminiscent of Romantic landscape paintings, architectural photography, and mixed-media modernist abstractions seemed to appear with increasing regularity. Nowadays, I walk nearly every day, partly from visual curiosity, and partly for exercise, or cheap therapy: the ‘walking cure’ title is a joke version of Freud’s talking cure, which I recycled for a piece on the great photographer, Walker Evans2. I shoot several hundred shots a week, many of which I post on Facebook (after editing and some minimal tweaking). Everyone loves San Francisco, and I am happy to share my interpretations of its scenic splendors as well as its absurd or gritty side, especially these days, as the city is changing so radically: ‘refreshing’ and reinventing itself as the Digital Oz.
My thanks to Gallery 25 Curator Charles Anselmo, whom I met, years ago, at Stanford Art Spaces, with whom I journeyed on photo safari to Havana in 2012, and with whom I serve as art juror for UC San Francisco’s Art for Aids annual auction. His interest in the images and his superlative printing skills are responsible for this show, my first foray back into the art world as a visual artist since taking up the camera of the itinerant, flâneur and pilgrim.
1http://www.visualartsource.com/index.php?page=editorial&aID=4307
http://artopticon.us/walker-evans-at-san-francisco-museum-of-modern-art-reprinted-from-visualartsource-dot-com-10-slash
2https://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/john-muir-and-the-walking-cure/Content?oid=2507122-13-slash-17
I never before saw a plant so full of life, so perfectly spiritual. It seemed pure enough for the throne of its Creator. I felt as if I were in the presence of superior beings who loved me and beckoned me to come. I sat down beside them and wept for joy. Could angels in their better land show us a more beautiful plant? — John Muir
Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long. — Walker Evans1
In March, 2011, I reviewed an exhibition on the life and work of the northern California naturalist John Muir: “A tireless champion for a wilderness that he believed to be divinely created, spiritually redemptive, and worthy of protection from Gilded Age laissez-faire industrial expansion, Muir saw getting back to the land at least occasionally as balm for "thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people" — a judgment shared by contemporary visitors to the Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks seeking their own "mountain baptism."2
While I as a longtime San Francisco resident, an art critic and curator, am anything but a rugged outdoorsman in the Muir mold, and largely confine my jaunts to urban and suburban fastnesses, I have found myself more and more interested in photography during the past decade or so. While I bought my first digital camera—a 4MP Canon A530—in order to make visual notes for reviewing gallery and museum shows, I found that I was seeing the everyday world more and more through eyes trained by art studies. Scenes reminiscent of Romantic landscape paintings, architectural photography, and mixed-media modernist abstractions seemed to appear with increasing regularity. Nowadays, I walk nearly every day, partly from visual curiosity, and partly for exercise, or cheap therapy: the ‘walking cure’ title is a joke version of Freud’s talking cure, which I recycled for a piece on the great photographer, Walker Evans2. I shoot several hundred shots a week, many of which I post on Facebook (after editing and some minimal tweaking). Everyone loves San Francisco, and I am happy to share my interpretations of its scenic splendors as well as its absurd or gritty side, especially these days, as the city is changing so radically: ‘refreshing’ and reinventing itself as the Digital Oz.
My thanks to Gallery 25 Curator Charles Anselmo, whom I met, years ago, at Stanford Art Spaces, with whom I journeyed on photo safari to Havana in 2012, and with whom I serve as art juror for UC San Francisco’s Art for Aids annual auction. His interest in the images and his superlative printing skills are responsible for this show, my first foray back into the art world as a visual artist since taking up the camera of the itinerant, flâneur and pilgrim.
1http://www.visualartsource.com/index.php?page=editorial&aID=4307
http://artopticon.us/walker-evans-at-san-francisco-museum-of-modern-art-reprinted-from-visualartsource-dot-com-10-slash
2https://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/john-muir-and-the-walking-cure/Content?oid=2507122-13-slash-17
