GLASS + LIGHT

Dolby Chadwick Gallery is honored to present Glass + Light, an exhibition of ground-breaking images by Amanda Means. This will be the gallery’s first show with the artist renowned for extending the limits of the photographic medium. Means reanimates common objects by reinventing their method of capture and rendering extraordinary portraits that restore a sense of wonder in the beauty of the everyday.

Means was raised on her family’s farm in upstate New York, surrounded by fruit orchards, dairy cows, and the ever-shifting patterns and intricacies of the natural world. As a child, she was a close observer of how the simplest elements (mud, stone, stick, rivulet) endlessly recomposed to reveal unique details. Her move to the built environment of New York City in 1974 initially presented a dauntingly different landscape. But Means began to see the bustle of crowds and the play of light through tall buildings as shifts every bit as visually poetic as the thrum of country life.

Her discovery of the Abstract Expressionist painters, particularly Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Klein also proved revelatory. Abstraction is a powerful aspect of her work: she captures pure form, line, and space with lyrical intensity to a degree that shape itself could almost be the subject matter of her work. Yet, focusing on that aspect alone would deny the expansive insights intensified by her choice of subjects. Two series of common objects – water glasses and lightbulbs – are the stars of Glass + Light.

What could be more quotidian than a glass of water? We customarily take our sips without much thought and with little study of either the container or the life-giving element within. Means knocks us out of this state of obliviousness. Never has water – in a liquid, solid, or gaseous state – been coaxed to undress our eyes in quite this way. Every bubble, every trickle of condensation, every breath of icy cube, and even the scratches along the glass surface appear lit from within. The objects seem almost to be the source of their own light. How does Means achieve this remarkable effect?

Means created a new technique of capturing “direct print” images. It’s a sort of camera obscura in reverse. The artist converted a 19th-century horizontal wooden camera into a darkroom enlarger. She places her object directly inside the head of this enlarger so that its lamp projects light through the water glass then through the lens and onto photo paper on the wall. This reveals intense dimensional detail. As Means explains: “Since the light passes through the water glass rather than being reflected off its surface, we see much more of the dynamism and drama occurring within the translucent glass vessel than would otherwise be the case with a traditional camera.” As these camera-less images have no film negative, The object becomes the negative.

Means’ divination of the inner alchemy of light within the everyday object continues in the Light Bulb Series. In these “glass flower” portraits, the artist turns from the silky subtlety of black & white to the exuberance of color. Now with two sources of light – the lightbulb and the lamp she places behind it – Means can adjust even further. She can dim the bulb’s incandescence, employ different exposure times to coax blurriness from the bulb’s filament, and explore novel combinations of color gel filters. Means stacks the filters, as a watercolorist would combine a medley of hues, to achieve fresh color combinations. The color filters may be placed between the camera and the bulb or behind the bulb.

An epiphany of the artist’s move from her rural upbringing to life in Manhattan was the neon signage that sprouted on every block. She began to see these bright lights as “flowers of the City.” The Light Bulb Series reveals how she nurtures an infinite variety into bloom. The seed within the idea (symbolized by the lightbulb itself) is a bountiful inner world of possibility. It doesn’t matter where one lives, one only needs the curiosity to explore. Means’ images become a metaphor for the hidden radiance within each of us.

Stand before the images that Means presents to us. Which of these Light or Glass feels most like your self-portrait at this moment? Be open to what arises. In finding for herself a liberation from the strictures of traditional photography and the pristine printing techniques she had mastered, Means works like a jazz musician, achieving a fluidity and effervescence that opens thrilling uncharted fields in which to play.

Amanda Means is a graduate of Cornell University and SUNY Buffalo. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her contributions to contemporary photography in 2017. Means has exhibited widely in the United States and abroad, and her work is included in numerous collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; the MIT List Visual Arts Center; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, N.Y.; and the Nicola Erni Collection, Switzerland. The artist lives and works in Beacon, New York.