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December Issue 2007
Corrigan Gallery in Charleston, SC, Features Works by John Moore and Sandy Logan
The Corrigan Gallery in Charleston, SC, is pleased to present a show of photographic works by John Moore and guest Sandy Logan beginning Dec. 7 and continuing through Dec. 31, 2007. This final show of the year for the gallery is a treat of color and detail.
Is there a natural extension of these two photographers' day jobs (a structural engineer and an architect) in their two dimensional creations? Both gentlemen have served on the city of Charleston's Board of Architectural Review supporting and defending a balance of new and old in this city that was once spoken of as a place "that time forgot." They are well versed in the delicate balance of nature and man's imposition on it. Their creative work takes this sense to another level although it steps back from the three dimensional world into the two dimensional documentation of it.
John Moore
Moore captures the eloquent scripting of time on metal with close, detailed photographs that allow the history of the metal to shine through. He shows nature at its most colorful and nature's encroachment on the man-made world or the world man has not yet touched. Rust, graffiti, the abandoned, the decaying, the neglected have all been subjects of his but in finding the bold color created by nature, the pattern and the repetition. Logan seeks the bigger social commentary in the color, pattern and ruin of what man has left behind, junked, stacked and neglected.
Moore's family is of the Carolinas, though
he spent his childhood living all over the country. He has lived
in Charleston for almost 30 years. Moore is a structural engineer
by profession, but photography has been his serious avocation
and passion for more than twenty-five years. Since 1984, Moore's
photographs have been winning awards and appeared in many juried
exhibits, including several Southern Visions exhibits at
The Museum of York County in Rock Hill, SC, several Piccolo
Spoleto Juried Exhibits here in Charleston and the Sierra
Club Nature Photography Exhibits.
In 1987 and in 1997, Moore had solo exhibits at The City Gallery
of Charleston. He has had several solo shows at The Charleston
County Library, and has participated in many group exhibitions.
Moore was a charter member of the founding of the South Carolina
Photographers' Guild in 1990. Also that year the South Carolina
Joint Legislative Committee on Cultural Affairs and the South
Carolina Arts Federation chose one of Moore's images to be the
given as the award for South Carolina Business and the Arts Partnership
Awards. In 2003, Moore produced a portfolio of Charleston street
photographs taken over 25 years. His work has been exhibited for
the past two years at the Corrigan Gallery.
"In college in North Carolina, I found myself in the Sierra Club, in the woods, and looking at photographs taken by the great conservation photographers Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter and others who took photographs of things that interested me," said Moore. "I began taking photographs. Then in Seattle for school it was like the other side of the world and I saw things in a different way. There, in a massive landscape of mountains off the scale of my experience and forests deep and dark, which all together are often every shade of gray, I took note of the bits and pieces of strong color that were close at hand. Ever since then I see color floating in fields, the mysteries of black, the warm against the cool, the screaming late afternoon and evening light in spots here and there where the close at hand is, to my eye, more interesting than the whole."
The focus of Moore's work has concentrated on natural landscapes, and the streets and buildings of Charleston and the rust that marks time. His images range from approximate near documentation of the scene, to abstractions, many represented in his Rust Never Sleeps series. The title is a phrase which became popularized by Neil Young from a song by the group Devo. The series was exhibited at the City Gallery of Charleston in 1997 with his first solo show having been twenty years ago at the same gallery.
Moore speaks of camping in the mountains on a weekend photographic shoot saying, "I stopped by a bridge over a stream. The stream did not speak, but the bridge was of interest. It was a steel bridge, with large gusset plates and varying patterns of rivets on the plates. Many of the surfaces had rusted and had been marked with graffiti. Having recently seen an exhibit of William Halsey's paintings at The College of Charleston (1995) and become interested in Richard Diebenkorn's paintings these images undoubtedly were in the back of my mind when I started photographing parts of the bridge. Rust and graffiti are easy targets for photographers yet I could not stop myself. Small pictures can become large worlds when you are looking through the view finder of a camera."
Sandy Logan
Guest photographer Sandy Logan returned to his native city of Charleston in 1970 after growing up in Philadelphia. He received his Bachelor in English at Cornell University and his Master of Architecture at University of Pennsylvania. He has practiced architecture for decades and only recently has his photography become public. Logan's interest in photography began during architecture school where he commenced a career-long investigation into the detail of not only the built environment but also the empty places wherein lay the cast-offs of disposable culture, starting with the train yards of West Philadelphia and continuing with the spent industrial area above the peninsula of Charleston.
As Logan himself describes, he shoots the "paeans to our disposable culture (which) if examined closely enough, can be abstractly splendid in their muteness and ruin. Gatherings of objects become merged into common patterns and rhythms as they settle into the dust they become mountains of baroque rust and lay silent in their cocoons of dust and dirt." His images speak to of the man-made world with industrialism's castoffs playing center stage.
Logan has had a Charleston City Gallery show as well as a City Gallery invitational show during the Piccolo Spoleto Festival in Charleston. He has been involved in several group shows including a 2006 show at 53 Cannon and has shown with the North Charleston Arts' Council and at various locations around the city. His work was featured in Charleston Magazine in Nov. 2006 in a photo essay entitled The Poetics of Ruins.
The Corrigan Gallery opened in 2005 presenting art with a future backed by intellectual process. Varied, thoughtful, thought provoking works are presented in an intimate space for the viewing pleasure of all. Bringing 20 years of Charleston art experience to collectors and presenting artists with up to fifty years of creating as well as those in the early years of their careers, the gallery provides a fresh alternative to the traditional southern art scene. Located in the heart of the historic district, the gallery combines the charm of the old city of Charleston with a look to the future. Paintings, drawings, fine art prints, photography and sculpture are readily available for the discriminating collector.
Artists represented include Manning Williams, Candice Flewharty, Gordon Nicholson, Mary Walker, Gene Speer, Richard Hartnett, Kevin Bruce Parent, John Moore, JD Cummings, Beverly Derrick, Kristi Ryba, Sue Simons Wallace, Daryl Knox, Lynne Riding, Lese Corrigan, Paul Mardikian, Karin Olah and Richard (Duke) Hagerty.
For further information check our SC Commercial
Gallery listings, call the gallery at 843/722-9868 or at (www.corrigangallery.com).
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