Vitone sets scenes; Schenck, Hunt go West; Vhay branches out

Wednesday, July 09, 2008

By Henry Sweets

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-Each of Dylan Vitone’s photographs captures the mood and personality of too many subjects to be the product of just one shutter click. By merging together multiple shots into one, long horizontal image, Vitone more eloquently presents the intangible aspects of a scene, like sounds and smells, as he builds the picture.

He shoots an event or place for up to several hours. He chooses one focal point and orchestrates other negatives around it to complete the story about those people and that place.

Vitone said his work is meant to simply communicate people’s beauty without judgment or ulterior motives.

 “It is creating a record of a place, and all the different types of people who exist in this one city at this one time,” he said.

Vitone shoots on 120-size film and prints his images digitally. Most of the photos now hanging at the Oswald Gallery were taken in Pittsburgh, where Vitone is an assistant professor of photography at Carnegie Mellon.

Vitone has showed in academic galleries and museums, but never before in a commercial sales gallery.

A reception for Vitone’s work will be from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Saturday at the Oswald Gallery, 165 N. Center Street. Call 734-8100 for more information.
                                                      •
Two Western artists, Bill Schenck and Kate Hunt, will show their art at Lyndsay McCandless Contemporary this weekend.

Schenck is known as an innovator in Western Pop Art. He gained fame with paintings that reduce cowboy images to simple, bright colors and explore the appeal Western films have to American viewers. You might have seen some of his work hanging around Jackson, like the huge topless beauty that once graced the back stairwell of the Rancher Bar.

His new works are digitally combined photographs and “graffiti” pieces. The photos deal with Western subjects like cowboys, American Indians and landscapes. He has orchestrated the images with patterns of light that create powerful, almost surreal images. In his graffiti work he writes messages – some politically charged – over photographs of people.

Kate Hunt is a sculptor who uses steel, twine and crisply-cut newsprint to create standalone and wall-hanging pieces. She cuts stacks of unread newspapers on a 100-year-old book cutter and arranges them in a pattern - sometimes standing in a tall tower and sometimes bent and splaying out of their bindings.

See Schenck and Hunt’s work from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. on Friday, July 11, at LMC, 130 S. Jackson Street. Call 734-0649 for more information.

                                                           •

Also this weekend, local watercolorist September Vhay will show a new side of her work. She has been dabbling with oil paint for the last few years, and said the new medium is allowing her to explore larger formats and richer colors.

This weekend she will show her new oil paintings of horses, a mountain goat and a swan, as well as watercolors of the locally famous Karns Meadow Foxes.
Her oil paintings stick to her style of painting animals against a white and gray background. The simple backdrop allows the animal’s personality to stretch and fill the space.

Vhay might see her artistic future and career flourish in oil paints and her new paintings will be of interest to her large local fan base.

Vhay will talk about her new work from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Thursday, July 10, at her gallery, Trio Fine Art, 545 North Cache Street. A reception will follow from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Call 734-4444 for more information.

Courtesy David Vitone
“Sprinklers” by Dylan Vitone.

PERMALINK:
Vitone sets scenes; Schenck, Hunt go West; Vhay branches out | Planet JH News Article: Arts Beat

Leave a Comment