Albina Press presents the photographs of friends, Gretchen Vaudt and Michelle Ott. Portlander Vaudt records images of a canoe trip, in the Boundary Waters, spanning the United States' Minnesota and Canada, also friends. At least I think we are friends. For me the landscape has a feeling of nostalgia. The north woods psychic and historic geography is documented by brilliant author William Cronon who is writing a landscape history of nearby Portage Wisconson. Vaudt has a great image of a birch wood, it has a similar feel to one of her recent images of a wall filled with discarded chewing gum, a uniform field of very individualistic objects. Ott, an Antarctic resident, captures beautiful bleak landscapes from which she excises objects marking human presence. These photos are c-prints with the emulsion removed from small areas and mounted on light boxes. The effect mimics Antarctic's 24 hour sunlight and fierce ultraviolet flux through the hole in the atmosphere's ozone layer over Antarctica and Patagonia, also man made. Ott has worked in Antarctica for three years and has a feel for the land and ice, or land of ice. If you have seen the Al Gore film on global warming, you may see in Ott's landscapes, edited to remove humans' affect on the land, a metaphor of hope for the larger impact we have had on the climate, Antarctica's soul.
Until 8 4637 N. Albina Ave at Blandena
