Endel Uiga, Marcia Krause Bilyk & Elaine Smithson

December 7, 2009-January 9, 2010
Reception: Thursday, December 10, 2010, 7-8 PM

Elaine Smithson

ARTIST’S STATEMENT
Elaine is principally a self-taught photographer who attended both the University of Rochester and Empire State College in Rochester, New York. She photographs exclusively in black and white, sometimes sepia toning her archival hand processed silver gelatin prints in a traditional darkroom. No gimmicks or tricks. She enjoys working with the contrast, texture, and tonal qualities of the monochrome medium.

She resided in Rochester, New York for 35 years and for the past nine years has been enjoying the exploration and discoveries of northeast New Jersey's rural landscapes and back roads.

Her photos have been published in calendars, hang in private collections, and she has had many single and group shows. Gallery 23 in Blairstown, New Jersey currently represents her.

As a fine-arts photographer, she strives to communicate the enigmatic and the symbolic through her black and white, hand-colored, and sepia toned photographs. She photographs what intrigues and inspires her, whether it be the humor and social statement of inner-city graffiti, the long-dead child's face carved on the decaying tombstone in a Boston cemetery, or the fragile, ageless beauty of flowers in a Venetian windowbox.

Marcia Krause Bilyk

ARTIST’S STATEMENT
Photography opens my eyes to the patterns and beauty of life in and around me. We are all expressions of the vast universe in which we dwell and of the sub-atomic particles of which we are made.  We are connected in ways for which there are no words.

Endel Uiga

ARTIST’S STATEMENT
My life’s work has been in electronics, building complex instruments including industrial cameras and ending up sharing my experience with the younger generation as a college professor. Now, retired for 20 years, I’m enjoying the world treasures I missed earlier: classical music, modern art and ballet, digging into quantum mechanics and cosmology, but most of all, engaging with photography. This has been my serious hobby since I was ten.

The world has changed during my life, starting with the horseless carrier being a memorable wonder. Most importantly, my understanding of science has been turned upside down. Newton’s solid “clockwork” paradigm is challenged with quantum mechanics where particles appear in two forms. The causality principle has being replaced with uncertainty and probability and the basic building blocks of all material seems to be tiny strings vibrating in 11 dimensional space. The universe also, instead of being created in seven days, seems to be started with the Big Bang that created a curved space filled with mysterious Black Matter where stars are still born and die with phenomenal explosions, hungry Black Holes are gobbling stars by the millions, and possible parallel universes exist. This world certainly looks exciting, but very strange, abstract and impossible to comprehend, even with my old doctor’s degree in engineering.

Visual arts have experienced a groundbreaking development also. For hundreds of years artist recorded their worthwhile impressions in realistic or stylizes images that clearly transferred their vision to viewers. However, beginning last century the conditions changed - instead of copying, artist created unique images, abstract and unusual, never seen before. ‘Their message was obscure and viewer’s response unpredictable. Thus, the causal connection between the stimulus and response is lost, giving room for different responses, just like in the development in modern science.

For a photographer this trend was difficult to follow - the camera is an absolutely honest device that records everything just as it is. Sure, there was a way to find images that looked abstract, but their selection was limited and took a good eye to collect these.

Everything changed only a few decades ago by developing digital photography and advancing computer science. Fortunately, this development unified my photo- graphic interest and working experience to a powerful and enjoyable tool. Programs like Photoshop allow, even from the simplest images, one to discover shapes, colors and shadings never seen before, thus opening new avenues to abstract photography. My raw images are collected from Hubble space pictures, hundreds of small details from junk yards, tree stumps or computer generated mathematical Mandelbrot shapes. They open a window to my imagination, almost like Rorschach inkblots, and after hours or days of work, I end up with some images that resonate with me and I feel that they are worth wasting printing paper. Some of them are presented here. Please ignore the titles, they are the reflection of a dull engineer’s mind. Just spread your wings of fantasy and imagination and enjoy whatever you see. Hopefully, they open a window into your mindscape also.

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