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Sunday, July 10, 2011
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The large-format photography
of Kipp Wettstein.
|
The large-format
photography of Kipp Wettstein. EverythingWestport.com Sunday, July 10, 2011
Click here to view the video
clip.
The soft-spoken, serious young photographic artist held a talk on
Sunday and shared his personal observations about himself and his photography
with an audience of over 30 who came to hear him speak. Landscape has always been part of life for Kipp Wettstein (b. 1979). Growing up in a U.S.
Forest Service work camp on the north rim of the Grand Canyon and
subsequently moving to the glaciated suburbs of Juneau, Alaska, Wettstein has always been faced with overwhelming
landscape. "To me this is kind of ironic, the entire system pulling
fertilizer from a landscape that can't fully grow anything other than a
little sagebrush. You take ancient sea salts from very desolate areas and
fertilize other areas." - Kipp Wettstein Wettstein used Yankee ingenuity to combine older 4x5
and 8x10 large-format film cameras with modern lens technology and digital
imagery to create a photographic platform for capturing grand landscape vistas
that he later reproduced as large-format prints. Coalescing youthful enthusiasm and a philosophical interpretation of
his environment that spans beyond his years, he was able to capture on film
the grand landscapes and vivid vistas that had captured his imagination as a
boy growing up in wilderness areas. The exhibition and sale runs from July 9th through August 7th, 2011.
After leaving The New Yorker in 2005, he began work with photographer Robert Polidori documenting the devastation of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Polidori’s body of work, titled “After the Flood,” was featured in The New Yorker and as a special exhibit in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Wettstein’s experience in New Orleans raised more questions about place, history, expectations, and ultimately our society’s collective literacy in its interpretation of landscape. In addition to his ongoing large-format project in the Great Basin of the southwestern United States, Wettstein, has attracted some attention for his handmade, purpose-specific, large-format cameras which will be on display at the exhibit.
THE PROJECT - Kipp Wettstein “For Water Will Not Do” investigates the history and legacy of Mormon settlement in the Great Basin of America—the sprawling, arid landmass including Utah, Nevada, Oregon, and California—during the second half of the nineteenth century. This project focuses on a single river within the Basin, the Colorado River. The story of the Colorado and its relationship to today’s American society can only be understood through a historical lens, through the sudden Mormon settlement and subsequent waves of westward expansion. The mark of Wettstein’s own out-cast Mormon ancestors and their facilitation of the westward expansion is written in the ghost towns along the Colorado, but the whole story is much more complicated, enduring, and ever-changing. It is about a declining river and an environmental disaster; it is the setting of harsh beauty that is home to nearly thirty-four million Americans. This body of work attempts to understand the historical and cultural forces that led to the extraordinary effort to ‘tame’ a landscape. It is also a record of a complex environment in an unprecedented transitional state with a large slice of American culture inescapably in tow."" - Quoted from Kipp Wettstein's biography. Click
here to view exhibit flyer.
PDF Dedee Shattuck
Gallery 1 Partners Lane, off 865 Main Road,
Westport. For more information please call or click (508)
636-4177 or email: dedeeshattuckgallery@gmail.com - - - - - End - - - - - ©
2011 Community Events of Westport
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""Landscape has
always been part of life for 
