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Chiarenza’s photographs focus of exhibit
Charles Chiarenza, “Untitled 253,” 1994. Gelatin silver print.
“Transmutation: Photographic Works by Carl Chiarenza” will open with a public reception for the artist from 6-8 p.m. Nov. 17 in the UB Anderson Gallery.
The exhibition will be on view through Feb. 24. It is free and open to the public in the Anderson Gallery, One Martha Jackson Place, off Englewood Avenue near Kenmore Avenue.
Chiarenza will deliver a lecture at 6:30 pm Nov. 12 in 112 Center for the Arts, North Campus, as part of UB’s Department of Visual Studies Speaker’s Series.
“Transmutation: Photographic Works by Carl Chiarenza” chronicles the evolution of the artist’s photography, exploring how his tightly framed, documentary-style images from the 1960s and 70s present a vocabulary of abstraction that would be further developed in his ongoing series of photographed collages constructed from scrap materials he started in the 1979.
Curated by Buffalo-based artist and photography historian Robert Hirsch, the exhibition also will chart Chiarenza’s move from working primarily with single photographs to the production of sequential images in order to expand on concepts of photographic time and space.
By hand-constructing mise-en-scènes to be photographed, Chiarenza transforms the natural world rather than recording it, contributing to the ongoing debate generated by digital imaging as it relates to our notions of lens-based truth. For Chiarenza, the camera, lens and exposure time are only starting points for shaping the image. His spirit of experimentation disrupts customary expectations through his use of everyday materials to visualize their metamorphosis into hauntingly beautiful abstractions that hint at horizons, geological strata and quixotic figures.
Viewers will see how Chiarenza’s meticulously crafted images transcend their specific subject matter and evoke an inner state of consciousness that grapples with a subject beyond its external structure. His luminous, black-and-white photographs remove his subject from the everyday world of color into an otherworldly realm. This act of transformation creates a symbolic language that references the physical world while reminding us that all photographs are representative constructions and not concrete realities.
Ultimately, Chiarenza’s work invites psychological speculation by encouraging us to examine the unconscious, or subliminal, workings of the mind, thus demonstrating how knowledge can be gleaned through a fabricated methodology.
Chiarenza is artist-in-residence and Fanny Knapp Allen Professor Emeritus of Art History at the University of Rochester. He was Fanny Knapp Allen Professor from 1986-1998.
Prior to joining the Rochester faculty, he was chair, director of graduate studies and professor of art history at Boston University.
A Rochester native, he received an AM and MS from BU and a PhD from Harvard University.
Chiarenza has lectured and taught workshops at more than 100 institutions in 33 states since 1966. His photographs have been seen in more than 80 one-person, and more than 250 group exhibitions since 1957.
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