Ground
~ on view through MAY 30, 2018 ~
With a nod west, I took trails paved and unpaved to the edge and back. Eden was a suggestion present and lost in highway shoulders, fallow gardens, desert blooms, parking lots, red canyons, towering silos, tide pools, and golden fields all seen through one eye of a twin lens Rolleiflex. Grounded, this beautiful machine transcribed transcribed hyperbolic orthogonality onto glass.
Hyperbolic (exaggerated reality) is a precise incrimination of photography. Orthogonality (dealing with right angles) is how a Rolleiflex presents an image to its viewer. You see, with this camera, you look down to look out. And I, I looked through my father’s lens and into the viewfinder of a battered Rolleiflex that belonged to a beloved stranger.
Each image shown here is a story written by light onto ground glass, and then onto a tiny semi-conductor, and then by ink onto paper: Trysts between two cameras and a photographer; between the ground beneath us and the world in front of us; between analog and digital; between reality and hyperbole; between me, subjects and substrates.
For this exploration into the Rolleiflex screen, I traveled around the United States celebrating our country’s gritty and grand spaces. And I began to read John Steinbeck’s opus, East of Eden. It became a companion while I worked on Ground. Passages from East of Eden that stopped me in my tracks became titles for images that had done the same. Soon the two began to intertwine like roots of distinct, proximate trees. Content, I ate the fruit of both.
~ Michael Weil 2018 ~
GROUND archival prints ~ signed, dated, and numbered
29" x 20" ~ in a series of 15 ~ $1050
limited edition signed exhibition catalogue $95