Photographic artist Osceola Refetoff has created many landscapes over the years that I’ve followed his work. Some are a unique take on the desert, revealing abandoned dreams and empty highways. Others feature the wings of airplanes and lustrous cloud formations; rain on a windshield; or they reveal abstract visions of urban light and land. He’s shaped stunning infrared photographs, and raw, so-dusty-you-can-smell-it photojournalism images of broken houses and jagged rock. Most recently, Refetoff has shown seemingly magical pinhole camera images that include ephemeral captures of people, mysterious places, and evocative but unrecognizable locations.
Kinematic Exposures, now at the Von Lintel Gallery at the Bendix building, available for viewing both online and in-person by appointment through October 31st, captures a sublime dreamscape of handheld, pinhole-camera exposures, primarily featuring images from a recent trip he made to Antarctica.
The desolate nature and graceful, swooping beauty of the icy landscape spins the viewer into a somewhat otherworldly dimension. Joining these images are elongated, reminiscent of Giacometti and Modigliani, vividly colored exposures of people. The latter provide viewers with the embodiment of living beings who could have come from another planet just as easily as earth.
Refetoff has described “Kinematic Pinhole Exposure™” as his own term for the images he creates “make while moving about with a pinhole camera.” The works reveal him to be not just a formidable documentarian of place and a conveyor of time and imagination, but as an artist plugged into the soul. The human soul, sure, but also seemingly that of the earth itself, and the sense of a greater being watching us with that slightly blurry but beautiful view from a pinhole camera.
He seems to dabble with turning reality into dream, and with the deeper experience of sensation and emotion as being an innate factor in creating any landscape.
In images such as “Shifting Seas,” the storm cloud of climate change and other human failings is perceived as anxiety, even within an otherwise peaceful, blue palette.
It is there again in the blur and rush of “Active Sound,” where the palette is less unified.
A fiery sun is all consuming in “Drifting Mesa,” an image that nonetheless offers a surreal memory-superimposition, at least for this viewer, of Big Bend National Park, and Monument Valley on an ice floe.
And his human forms in the “Persistence of Being” are both surreal future and mystical reimagining of our place on this planet.
Private viewings for Kinematic Exposures are schedule at 30 minute intervals; masks required. Regular gallery hours are Wednesday – Saturday, 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. To schedule a visit, stop by http://vonlintel.com/.
- Genie Davis; images provided by artist