Day 157 Thaw

May 15, 2015

(This is part of a 365 project during my 70th year where I write and illustrate a blog on each day's gift.)

 

Photographer Janet Little Jeffers stands in front of her image in an exhibit at WTMD.

Art shakes up and rearranges perceptions. And artists, the messengers of art, are masters of metaphor that changes our perceptions. Through metaphor, two unrelated things are connected. It is the epiphany of these new connections that encourages the mind to reach out to explore even more connections. This is why I love art. It constantly changes my mind and pushes it to grow. The opposite of change and growth—stagnation and death—is not something I am ready for.

Tonight I attended the opening reception of an exhibit by Janet Little Jeffers, a local photographer who is currently showing her images captured far from Baltimore.  Through connecting Greenland and Cuba, she creates an unlikely metaphor:

Images of remote, surreal polar landscapes contrast with the rich, decaying man-made Cuban environment. Both areas have been in the news recently, for different kinds of thawing — one from global warming; the other from a warming of diplomatic relations.” ~ from exhibit news release

 I first met Janet in her Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower studio where I admired her talent of making the ordinary look extraordinary with her close-up shots of rust and textures that usually would not warrant special notice. Janet’s lens captures richness in whatever lies in front of it and this is obvious in her current exhibit Thaw. Her vision of how to display her images also embraces this richness—from the insightful metaphoric title of the exhibit to the varied displays of digital screen, traditional frames, fabric, and adhesive on giant windows. A huge photo of an iceberg on the windows of the exhibit space at radio station WTMD offers another dimension to the icy image as changing outside light filters through. At first, I noticed the vibrant ice blue with subtle juxtaposition of color shades. Then I stepped back to take in the expansive blue scene and, at first, felt the illusion that I was actually looking out the window at the ice.

A mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions." - Oliver Wendell Holmes

 My gift today was a new metaphor.

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> Day 158 Ontology of Space and Place

You can find links to my other posts on this project here:
http://bjschupp.blogspot.com/2014/12/365-gifts.html

http://wtmd.org/radio/2015/05/04/wtmd-presents-thaw-photos-of-cuba-and-the-polar-regions-by-janet-jeffers-on-may-15/