Date: January 22, 2009

Contact: Crystal Walter

 

Wichita:  Self-taught photographer Larry Blackwood sees something that the rest of Kansas takes for granted – art in the towers on the plains. In his exhibition, Elevations: Exploring Beauty of Grain Elevators, Blackwood approaches photographing elevators much as someone would explore the architectural features of buildings designed with artistic beauty foremost in mind. In contrast to buildings designed primarily to make an architectural statement, elevators are more about function than form. Yet the wide variety of elevator sculptural shapes and textures, as well as the play of shadows across the structures, provides as rich a source of images as any building or cathedral.

 

Blackwood grew up on the plains of Kansas where grain elevators dominate the landscape. He first started photographing the structures as a teenager. Through his adult life his photographic style changed from the use of a dark room to the use of state of the art digital photography that highlights every nuance of light and dark.

 

Blackwood started out photographing elevators in wide angle shots that also include the surrounding environment, but gradually became more interested in near and close-up views. Even in the widest views of elevators in this collection the surroundings are incidental to the structure itself. The collection of photographs favors closer views of the graphical and abstract compositions of patterns and shadows that can be found in these structures.

 

Blackwood’s images of the towers on the plains may seem odd to speak of in an architectural fashion. However, grain elevators are such utilitarian structures; utility is what many of these photographs are about. Larry Blackwood has lived the last 25 years in Montana and Idaho which has provided a further connection with these structures, as he travels often back and forth across the Great Plains. 

 

 

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February 8 through July 19, 2009

 

 

 

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