Brock Minnich Assignment #1

Adapting Spaces: A Photographic Exploration In Four Acts exhibited in the Haas Gallery of Art challenged the viewer to look beyond the camera lens. The exhibit featured photographers Ryan Adrick, Tracy Longley-Cook, Daniel Kariko, and John Mann. Upon first glance the Adapting Spaces exhibit may appear to onlookers as if the the photographers were capturing abstract glimpses of their environment. However upon further exploration, pun intended, the viewer can begin to discover a more intimate relationship between the photographer and his composition, a relationship and dynamic that I was unfamiliar with and wasn't ever exposed to throughout my years as an art student.

Ryan Adrick's contribution within this series captivated my interest and illustrated this intimate relationship best my opinion.

"Ryan Adrick's Artist Series demonstrates the non-endemic nature of the artist. Adapting to various creators and their contexts to re-address their settings through a modified vantage, Adrick juxtaposes the people and the places that he has encountered through his own artistic odyssey. He explains, "My Artist Series is a journey of self-awareness and the connections made with the world around us. Each photograph is based on relationships that I have made with artists and how these interactions would inform my own visual exploration. Inspired by these artists I began to explore the landscape; meditating on the association between person and place." The images, photographed in several regions throughout Europe and North America, are the artist's intimate response to his own negotiation of spaces, and they present a direct confrontation to the viewer in an attempt to achieve a mutual or simultaneous exchange between the two."

Within these paired portraits lies the very relationship being described, where the artist is building and forming these relationships. For instance, in the image above left depicts a woman, and fellow artisan, Adrick met during his stay in Berlin. The image just to the right displays the metro in Berlin, the relationship between the two is found within the lines of the rails, where the woman in the composition to the left often used lines within her own artwork as Adrick found out. Not only is there a relationship between the images themselves, but the artist also creates a his own relationship to the compositions.

Upon listening to Ryan Adrick speak about his series I began to sway my own vantage point, not just on his own series, but on how I view other works of art, and ultimately challenged myself to find and create my own intimate relationship with the objects found in my own compositons.