Photofest, Lincoln, NE

Sheldon Museum of Art is again hosting the city wide Photofest in Lincoln, NE. Additional information of galleries and exhibitions involved will be posted as they become available. Below is from Sheldon's website.

Transforming Vision: Photographic Abstraction in Sheldon’s Collection opens February 4, 2011 and is part of Photofest, Lincoln’s biennial, citywide celebration of the medium, now in its second year. Instead of exploring the camera’s capacity to capture reality, Transforming Vision emphasizes its ability to alter our view of reality. Featuring approximately forty works from the Sheldon Museum of Art’s permanent collection by major artists such as Harry Callahan, Barbara Crane, Arthur Siegel, Henry Holmes Smith, and Edward Weston, the exhibition examines photography’s status as perceptual archetype through its reputation as a reproductive or straightforward medium, questioning the validity of photographic objectivity itself.

Rather than showcasing recent developments in darkroom manipulation or digital technology, the majority of works featured in the exhibition are considered documentary images, many of them created in the mid-twentieth century at Chicago’s legendary Institute of Design, a hotbed of photographic innovation. While each photographer uses the visible world as a starting point, their images possess no easy visual resolution; subjects are dissolved, fragmented, or reduced to achieve particular expressive purposes. In some cases, artists have employed a variety of creative interventions—from experimental materials to imaginative angles to unusual juxtapositions of forms and textures—and thus transformed commonplace, everyday subjects into highly personal visions that divorced photography from its literal associations and instead explored its cosmic, philosophical, transcendent, and, ultimately, its abstract potential.