Charles Grogg
Reconstructions
Woodstock Times - September 6, 2012
SMART ART by Paul Smart
Reconstructions at BMG
Been noticing the steady flow of folks into Galerie BMG on Tannery brook Road, next to the new pocket park and across from the parking lot? Some have been traipsing in to see Richard Edelman's new collaborative works with inventor Ward Fleming's new pinscreens. But just as many have been drawn by the fascinating new exhibit, Reconstructions, that gallery owner Bernard Gerson's been showing for the past few weeks of "fractured photographs" by Charles Grogg, an artist represented by the gallery since 2010 whose works are printed piece by piece in platinum/palladium on handmade Japanese paper, then stitched together to form haunting re-constructed images.
Galerie BMG will be hosting a reception for the artist, and this show that's been at the gallery for several weeks now, the evening of Saturday, September 8.
"I am attempting to pull the world apart and stitch it back together as if I were a tailor or some absurd god trying to wring a new reality out of old parts," says the self-taught photographer, whose work was celebrated in a well-received monograph publication this past year. "In these works I have tried to displace the event of viewing familiar natural imagery without obliterating it but making it less than comfortably recognizable."
As integral to the viewing process as the natural imagery Grogg centers each work around are the strings and wires, tendrils, roots and veins he stitches things together with...or allows to play thematically into each piece. They end up being about the fragility of beauty, and life, as well as a commentary on the once-sacrosanct idea that a photograph is pure truth, unadulterated.