Tom Uttech | Photographs from the 1970s
October 7 through November 6, 2004
Fuller Building Open House Thursday, October 14, from 6:00 to 9:00 pm
The gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of Tom Uttech’s black and white photographs from the 1970s. The show will consist of 10 silver gelatin prints, each 14 x 14 inches, and a selection of smaller vintage prints. It marks the first exhibition devoted to the artist’s photographs, which are included in the current Milwaukee Art Museum’s Uttech retrospective (Magnetic North:The Landscapes of Tom Uttech, through October 3; www.mam.org).
The subjects of Uttech’s photographs, like his paintings, are the North Woods of Wisconsin, Minnesota and the Boundry Waters. Imagery includes dense forests, fallen trees, lichen, moss and lakes during storms.
Uttech has said that he uses photography metaphorically rather than descriptively. Concentrating on different types of light, pattern and surface texture, he has allowed those elements to inform the content. There is a sense that the wilderness Uttech shoots is a lost paradise. Even though the forests he depicts are protected land, the quality of passing time witnessed by the overgrown trees and carpets of lichen and moss seems to be of a time and place that we have mostly lost.
Lucy Lippard says in her essay for the Milwaukee Museum catalogue: “Behind every one of Uttech’s haunting and clearly contemporary images lies a hard-fought battle to be true to nature, to be as real as possible, and then to transcend reality, to reach another plane that communicates his feelings for the great mysteries of the northern wilderness.” Uttech stopped taking photographs in the mid-1970s.