July 13th a William Wegman exhibition opened at Bowdoin College Art Museum called "Hello Nature". The exhibition fills five rooms, and is comprised of paintings, drawings, photographs, and videos. There is a book, entitled "Hello Nature", that accompanies the exhibition, and I have seen it in other bookstores, including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts Store. There are some comments he made at his artist talk that I would like to remember:
"When you're making a photograph you're really making a map of things. Fattening things out helps you to explain them."
William Wegman went to photography because in the 60's there was a belief that painting was dead. He liked photography because photographs are small, can be reproduced. put in books, and spread around. He liked the idea of 'small' and 'moveable', particularly in response to the large earthworks being created out west at the time.
Wegman searches for structure and meaning in his photography. He likes taking ordinary things out of their ordinary sphere and putting them out of sync.
When Wegman began taking photos of his dog Man Ray with props he didn't really have any plan for where things would go. And he learned quickly that he had to allow the "Luck" to happen in his work.
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