Forward, Backward, Up, Down
My show, Forward, Backward, Up, Down, opened February 11, 2017 at BlackRock Center for the Arts in Germantown, Maryland, with a Meet the Artist reception from 2-4 pm. Also opening were shows by photographer Joshua Dunn and a juried printmaking exhibition. All of these shows will continue through March 11, 2017. Be sure to walk upstairs to the Terrace Gallery to see the two photography exhibitions.
The works that I am showing are both two-dimensional and three-dimensional. They are spherical panoramas, created by taking many photographs from a single point in space, stitching them together digitally, and projecting the sphere of data onto a surface or creating a solid sculpture. Each panorama is shown in the gallery as a sculpture, around which the gallery visitor can view the entire scene. These sculptures, in themselves, are a unique way to display a spherical panorama. On the walls there are contrasting stereographic projections created from each panorama. These projections are highly distorted, as they are not simple rectilinear projections as a camera would normally capture, but have fields of view much larger than physically possible with even a fisheye lens. Each of the projections highlights an aspect of the scene that may, in many cases, be originally so minor as to be ignored or have a geometric form that surprises the viewer that it is even created by photography. By combining the two-dimensional and three-dimensional works in this way, I challenge the viewer to make sense of the different images and to leave the gallery learning that the world as we normally perceive it is only one of the many views we could have.
Five of the sculptures are cubes, aligned so that opposing corners represent the scene’s zenith and nadir. My latest piece, “Under the Arch,” is a truncated triangle trapezohedron, also known as a Dürer’s Solid, after Albrecht Dürer, who depicted one in his engraving “Melancholia I” in 1514. The 360 degree panorama was taken under the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel in Paris.
Thomas A. Germer Photography 