art21 Final project

1. art21
Rachel Quinn

2. “East from Flagstaff Mountain, Boulder County, Colorado,” 1975
Robert Adams
Gelatin silver print, 11 x 14 inches
Adam’s photographs are usually either absent of human subjects or sparsely populated, while
still capturing the physical traces of human life. The artist’s work often presents a contradiction
between natural landscapes and those visibly transformed by humans as seen here in the
seven mountain top setting contrasted with the populations and towns below.

3. “Morning Fog”
Rachel Quinn
January 2016
iPhone photograph, 633 x 377 pixels
With Adams work being typically absent of human life and often showing a vast sparsely
populated area the background, I knew I wanted to photograph a spot that I’ve run by many
foggy mornings and had a similar emotional response to. On this particular morning, the fog
blurred the background scenery making it almost indistinguishable from the water. The only
prominent object in the photograph is the man-made dock that separates the peaceful scenery,
which I found to be along the lines of thought with Adam’s depictions of landscapes visibly
transformed by humans.

4. “Ocean Surface Wood Engraving 2000”
Vija Celmins
2000-2001
Wood Engraving on Zerkall paper, 20 3/4 x 17 1/4 inches
Using primarily blacks and grays, Celmins depicts and expands upon limitless spaces in her
photographs. With her work she has the ability to match a tangible sense of space with extreme
detail in each project. She often studies her work for long periods of time in order to fully grasp
the image that she is looking for.

5. “Tunnel”
Rachel Quinn
January 2016
iPhone photograph, 640 x 631 pixels
Immediately when I saw Celmins work I thought about the long, narrow tunnels of the DC metro
that appear to be so steep and limitless when you first look down. While Celmins usually works
with natural scenes, I thought an interesting response to her work would be depicting a
seemingly limitless space that was man-made and not found in nature. Her use of primarily

6. blacks and greys add to the limitless space, which I felt was accurately depicted by the never-
ending shades of black and grey within the metro tunnels.
“The Pulasky Skyway Crossing the Hackensack River”
Rackstraw Downes
2007
Oil on canvas, 24 x 66 1/2 inches
Downes considers himself a painter of his surroundings and his environment. He often paints
his works in panoramic format, paying careful attention to detail while accurately depicting the
broad expanses of the subjects surroundings. Often times, his paintings are of industrial images
that are disrupting nature. In this painting in particular we see a bridge and factory in the
background cutting across a body of water. His compositions usually feature horizons that bend
according to the way the eye naturally perceives.

7. “Downes Skyline”
Rachel Quinn
January 2016
iPhone photograph, 633 x 377 pixels
In his paintings, Downes depicts his environment and surroundings using a panoramic format to
bend the painting in the way the eye naturally does when taking in our surroundings. They just
built a new bridge/running connecting two sub-neighborhoods of Philadelphia (where I attend
school) and I knew this would be the perfect place to take a panoramic photograph in response
to Downes work. While he does this using paintings, it was pretty cool to see that I could reflect
and respond with a staged photograph using only my phone. I tried a few different angles for
this shot, but responding to Downes careful attention to detail, I experimented until I found the
perfect angle for the water to reflect the streets and sky in a way that I thought pulled the entire
work together. A common theme I found in most of my favorite works on Artists 21 is the idea of
nature and the industrial world blending in different ways, whether it be harmonious or
disruptive, and this was my own personal response to this concept.