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Indepth Arts News:
"John Antjas: Prose"
2004-02-09 until 2004-02-28
Ohio Art League
Columbus, OH,
USA United States of America
The Ohio Art League is pleased to present the work of John Antjas in their February 2004 Member Curated Exhibition, Prose. John Antjas has been seeing with only one eye, "solo," mono-optic, since his birth. He brings a single-pointedness, a slow and patient seeing to his process and to his photographs. His images manifest in the viewer the isolation of their location and subject matter, as well as their photographer. Antjas shoots a 4x5 view camera, with which a tripod cannot be used, often alone in locations where most people would not slow down, let alone stop to observe.
He literally and metaphorically absorbs the beauty and light emanating from his strange landscapes. In the tradition of illustrating the extraordinary in the ordinary, Antjas’s photographs reveal the ether, the soul, of the spaces and places the world has forgotten. In his work we see lonely expanses of urban landscape, such as abandoned industrial parks, a defunct drive-in with a lone displaced chair, a single old tree carved to make space for electric lines along a two-lane road, or a boarded-up warehouse barely visible through the ghost-image of a passing train. Strong and poetically lonesome, these pictures of our peripheral environment invoke a reverie for a time and place left behind.
Two of Antjas's works were included in the very selective 2002 Spring Juried Exhibition at the Columbus Museum of Art.
Curator Elizabeth Francis, trained as an architect and an amateur photographer herself, has conveyed this essence of patient isolation inherent in the artist’s nature and methodolgy, with the goal that the viewer should see as the photographer sees, from his mindful vantage point, for a suspended moment.
The Ohio Art League is a nonprofit membership-based organization, dedicated to the presentation and support of Ohio artists. The gallery is located at 954 N. High Street in Columbus' Short North. The gallery is open to the public every Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 12 -5 pm. For more information please contact Ellen Grevey at 614-299-8225.
The Ohio Arts Council helped fund this program with state tax dollars to encourage economic growth, educational excellence and cultural enrichment for all Ohioans.
IMAGE
John Antjas
Marion County, Stairs
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