Smithsonian
Traveling Exhibition Features Photographs by Robert Creamer
Digital technology reveals
the beauty of nature in Robert Creamer's latest work, "Transitions:
Photographs by Robert Creamer." The exhibition created by the Smithsonian
Institution Traveling Exhibition Service in collaboration with the National
Museum of Natural History, will open at Georgia Highlands College's
Floyd campus Monday, Sept. 14 in the Lakeview Building's art gallery.
Open from 8 a.m. until 6 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 8 a.m. until
noon on Friday, the exhibit will run through Monday, Nov. 23.
It showcases how beauty can be found in the most unexpected places.
Robert Creamer is renowned
for using contemporary digital technology to convey a melancholy beauty.
"I'm challenging the traditional notion of beauty as something perfect
and flawless," said Creamer about his photographs, many of which show
flowers in various stages of decay.
Transitions is the seventh
SITES exhibition hosted by GHC over the past four years. "Through
our continuing partnership with SITES, we've been able to enrich the
academic life of the college and the cultural life of the community
by bring these beautiful, insightful, educational and entertaining exhibits
to the people of Rome/Floyd County and the surrounding area," said
John Spranza, GHC's director of student life.
In creating the works for the
exhibition, Creamer traded his usual camera for a flatbed scanner. His
compositions use flora and fauna that are placed directly on the scanner
in aesthetic arrangements or suspended over it. The resulting detail
is eerily lifelike, yet incredibly expressive. Creamer's subjects
are drawn from the research collections at the Smithsonian's National
Museum of Natural History, the Fairchild Tropical Botanical Gardens
in Florida, and the Echo Hill Outdoor School in Maryland.
"The use of a digital scanner
instead of a camera brings a very different outlook to this exhibit,
and this unique use of technology makes the very nature of these photos
different from any other previous exhibit we have hosted," said Spranza.
"Visitors will be amazed at the clarity and color of these pictures.
Part of the fun of the exhibit is figuring out the subject matter of
the photo."
Transitions features 39 of
Creamer's high-resolution images created exclusively for the exhibition.
Many are paired to show a subject in transition. This exhibition also
features a video by videographer Jeannie Yoon about Creamer's scanning
and printing.
Robert Creamer's association
with the Smithsonian began when he scanned a variety of objects and
specimens at the Naturalist Center, an educational outreach facility
of the National Museum of Natural History located near Leesburg, Virginia.
That experience led to scans of scientific collections housed at the
National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.
Creamer has transitioned multiple
times himself during the 30 years of his professional photography career.
His talents include botany, photography, natural history, and teaching.
He is also a widely published fine art and architectural photographer.
He started using the scanner on a whim in 2002 when he found a dead
hummingbird in his Maryland neighborhood. After experimenting with the
bird, he continued to scan plants and animals from his backyard and
those that were brought home to him by his children and even his cat.
Those initial scans inspired his artistic vision catapulting him to
a new realm of visual art. He began selecting material based on his
intuition of how it would develop in the short time ahead and how it
would look like scanned. He monitored his specimens closely looking
for the exact moment that some new point of view was revealed.
SITES has been sharing the
wealth of Smithsonian collections and research programs with millions
of people outside Washington, DC for more than 50 years. SITES connects
Americans to their shared cultural heritage through a wide range of
exhibitions about art, science and history, which are shown wherever
people live, work and play.
After the exhibit closes in
Rome it will continue on an 11-city national tour through 2011. Groups
may schedule dates and times by appointment outside the regular schedule
by contacting the Office of Student Life at 706-295-6363 or emailing jspranza@highlands.edu. Admission is free.
#
# #
Georgia Highlands College is
a two-year institution of the University System of Georgia serving more
than 5,000 students at six sites in Rome, Cartersville, Marietta, Dallas
and Douglasville.