In conjunction with the 12th Annual Virginia Film Festival, TechnoVisions, Charlottesville's Dream's Light Gallery will present an exhibition of recent works by Lynn Hyman Butler, of New York, and Boris Starosta, a local artist, designer of this year's Virginia Film Festival poster/brochure. The exhibition, entitled Nocturnal Moments/Waking Dreams, is comprised of stereoscopic images in several 3-D print formats by these innovative artists. The opening will be held October 1, from 6: P.M. to 9:00 P.M. The show will run through October 31, 1999 at Dream's Light Gallery, located at 106 5th Street, in Charlottesville, Virginia.
In Nocturnal Moments, Lynn Butler presents her dreamlike 3-D photography using cutting-edge full color StereoJet prints, viewed with polarized glasses. Her stereographs of horses and nudes in the nighttime forest setting reveal her love of the animals and of the places and landscapes they inhabit. Butler's three-dimensional work is a rarity in the art world as the StereoJet technology she employs is still in development at the Rowland Institute for Science. The prints are similar to so-called Vectographs, first developed in 1940 by Edwin Land for use in examining aerial stereographs during the war effort. The StereoJets bring the improvement of full color 3-D images and the promise of wide availability in the future, as they are printed using mostly off-the-shelf inkjet technology. Currently, this technology is available to only a few artists in the stereoscopic genre.
First exhibited earlier this year at the Norton Museum in Palm Beach, Florida, the Nocturnal Moments series of Butler's StereoJet 3-D prints present a ghostly, nearly holographic view into the artist's passion for the environment. The works feature nighttime landscapes, light painting of nudes, horses and Collies, sometimes with multiple exposures or exposures while in motion. These works communicate the fragile, quixotic environment around Thompson Ridge, where she resides, about 70 miles north of New York City.
Butler has exhibited her prints worldwide, garnering numerous awards and grants over the past 18 years as a renowned art photographer. Her images are part of the prestigious Aperture traveling exhibition Metamorphoses: Photography in the Electronic Age.
In Waking Dreams, Boris Starosta shows recent works in color anaglyphic prints: three- dimensional computer generated fantasy landscapes, stereo-photographic nudes, portraits and 3-D abstractions. His exhibit will also include two StereoJet prints from an earlier work.
The anaglyph process reveals three-dimensionality in specially prepared images when the viewer looks at the print through glasses with red and blue lenses. The process is commonly seen in comic books and as an advertising gimmick. Starosta defeats the historical burden of marginality that anaglyphs carry by hiding within his prints the very thing that makes them anaglyphs: the color fringing along the edges in reds and blues which is caused by parallax/depth within the image.
In some images, the fringing is obscured by the fact that the objects of depth are blurred. The red/blue edges become part of the blur and are effectively obscured-camouflaged. In other images, the fringing becomes part of the composition: the abstraction of floating, discorporeal objects in space is only supported by the separation of colors through parallax. Thus, the fringing appears as a deliberate part of the "flat" composition.
Working as a freelance illustrator in Charlottesville since 1991, Boris Starosta has been an active 3-D photographer for the past two years. In that time, he has won recognition in several international exhibitions of stereo photography.
The show runs from October 1st through October 31st, 1999. Located adjacent to the Charlottesville Downtown Mall, Dream's Light Gallery is one of Charlottesville's most innovative art spaces.
This event is being held as part of the expanded program of TechnoVisions, the 12th Annual Virginia Film Festival, held annually in Charlottesville, Virginia.
