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| Out of the Way: Landscapes by photographers Carol J. Carter and Fritz Goeckner |
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 Carol J. Carter: “Storm at Coal Wash” |
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“Out of the Way,” a joint exhibition by photographers Carol Jean Carter and Fritz Goeckner, runs from September 4 through September 23, 2008. Carol J. Carter, a Burlington native, now lives in Des Moines. One of her previous long-term projects,“Artifacts of Industry,” explored the industrial interiors of Iowa factories that had been closed or demolished. Her current project, Spoils, continues to explore Iowa’s industrial past. There are fifteen photographs from this series in the Art Guild exhibition. Explaining the project, Carter writes: Coal mining in Iowa started in the mid-1800s and hit its peak in 1918. Coal was used for heating and cooking, but the big consumer of coal here was the railroad. Coal hasn’t been mined in the state since 1995, and there are hundreds of abandoned coal sites in Iowa. Most of the sites are the remains of surface mining. Referred to as “spoils,” these piles, ridges and mounds are often so acidic that little will grow on them. The state Mines and Minerals Bureau has been diligently working to eliminate the hazardous remains through the Abandoned Mined Land Reclamation Act. Carter’s photographs take cues from documentary photography but use a more painterly approach to maximize the storytelling element of her work. Her saturated colors and attention to lighting are means to capture the poignant beauty and stories of “discarded” places.
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Fritz Goeckner, originally an Illinoisan, has lived in Burlington for a decade and a half. His eighteen recent photographs portray rural midwestern landscapes “waiting in beady-eyed loneliness, cozy in the bosom of the bypass.” With tongue in check, Goeckner’s “artist’s statement” reads: More than a decade has elapsed since Fritz Goeckner emerged from a shadowy career in nuclear physics to plague the Burlington art scene. He began with the aggravatingly sluggish development of a type of photography from which the black-and-white element of the picture is omitted, leaving only a ghost of pure color — a trick that serious photographers know is just wrong. He continued with an annoying fixation on avoidance of proper photographic subjects such as sunsets and barns, or people either enviably more beautiful or quaintly less fortunate than the photographer and viewers. The photos on display here continue this vexing trend. The towns shown are so ordinary and unimportant that the highways that used to connect their main streets have been replaced by new four-lane highways that bypass them entirely. Like a passenger on a coast-to-coast flight, you save time and watch them float by in the hazy distance: small towns, waiting in beady-eyed loneliness, cozy in the bosom of the bypass. |
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Copyrighted image of Arts for Living Center used by permission of artist, David Garrison |
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