Opuntia 1. Cattail Falls , BBNP. Far West Texas
54″ x 36″, linen-cotton canvas
Opuntia 1. Mule Ears, BBNP. Far West Texas
40″ x 36″, cotton silk
Texas
Ecstatic Camouflage: Chilicote Springs
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Canopy 1. Chilicote Springs, Big Bend Ranch State Park, Texas
66″ x 38″ inkjet print
Canopy 2. Chilicote Springs, Big Bend Ranch State Park, Texas
38″ x 50″ inkjet print
Ecstatic Camouflage at Marfa Book Company on 9 March 2012
Friday, March 9th, 6 – 8 PM @ Marfa Book Company
Exhibition: Marfa artist and photographer Daniel Chamberlin will be presenting new works in his “Ecstatic Camouflage” series for a brief, three day show that coincides with Tonalism, an all night ambient film and music event presented by dublab and El Cosmico. (Tonalism features a new, temporary installation by Adam Bork, live projections by CINEMARFA, and music by Sun Araw and J D Emmanuel, and more.)
Click here for the full press release from Marfa Book Co., or read on below.
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The Marfa Book Company will host an exhibition of new works by Marfa-based artist Daniel Chamberlin entitled “Ecstatic Camouflage” this weekend, March 9 – 11, with an opening for the artist on Friday, March 9th from 6 – 8 pm.
According to the artist, “Ecstatic Camouflage is an explicitly psychedelic post-landscape photography.” In deed, these photographs make a break with tradition and do not call to mind the work of Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, Robert Glenn Ketchum, or Richard Misrach, though, ostensibly, they share the same subject. The break may at first seem technical, a consequence of new technologies for manipulating images, but on further study, it becomes evident that it’s something else. For Chamberlin, that word is psychedelic or shamanistic.
“It is a post-landscape photography that explodes anthropocentric notions of perspective by way of repetition and rotation, an organic visual drone. It is an attempt at revealing my communion with the so-called “plant mind” of shamanistic lore.”
Several of the photographs in “Ecstatic Camouflage” were taken locally, in the Chisos Basin, and the Davis Mountains. Viewers may not immediately recognize these places however, and not just because the artist avoids iconic, monumental treatments for his subjects. In fact, the photographs resemble mandalas or yantras rather than icons or monuments. Curiously, his technique, involving minimal post-camera manipulation, does not hide the changes he makes, but demonstrates them openly. In the kaleidoscopic image that results from his repetitions and rotations, horizon lines vanish; trees and flowers, divide or merge; water appears throughout the surface; and the sky turns inward.
For his exhibition at the Marfa Book Company, Chamberlin chose ten pieces from an archive of hundreds of raw photographs taken in the Southwestern and South Central United States. The pieces selected are ink jet prints on canvas and range in size from three by four, to four by five feet in dimension.
Daniel Chamberlin was born in Indiana, and lived for twelve years in Los Angeles before moving to Marfa. He was a contributing editor to Arthur Magazine. He is a nationally registered EMT and currently works for Marfa EMS.
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Terribly Beautiful — 25 February 2012
Marfa artist, writer and EMS Emergency Medical Technician, Dan Chamberlin, stands next to one of his art pieces at the bottom. (photo: Alberto Tomas Halpern)
More images from our trip to the Terribly Beautiful group show in Terlingua, Texas at Beto’s wonderful (and long overdue) new photoblog: albertohalpern.tumblr.com.
Ecstatic Camouflage: Lichens of the Chisos and Davis Mountains
Click the images below to enlarge
Shooting Clouds – Davis Mountains, Texas – 16 April 2010
On location in the Davis Mountains of Far West Texas with filmmaker Jennifer Lane and David Hollander.
Jennifer Lane‘s new film, CLOUDS, is screening this Thursday, May 6th, at 9:30 pm under the stars at El Cosmico as part of the Marfa Film Festival.
CLOUDS (8 minutes) is a meditation on the water cycle of planet Earth, with lots of images of our beautiful and unique far West Texas cloud formations.
Check out the festival website for more details
http://marfafilmfestival.org/2010/films/
Tickets are available at the door.
¡Verde Terlingua! in Arthur Magazine
In April of 2009 I traveled to Terlingua, a remote border settlement in the Chihuahuan Desert of Far West Texas, to spend time with the DIY homesteaders and off-the-grid outsiders who were getting down together for the first annual Terlingua Green Scene. I’m in the process of publishing my account of the wild times I had there in Arthur Magazine.
Read the first installment, “No Winners, Only Survivors,” at the Arthur Magazine website. More chapters are on their way, so stay tuned.
For more of my reporting and photography about the Marfa “drug blimp” and other paranoid visions from this unique region of the Lone Star state, check out “Dread Zeppelins: Letter from West Texas,” also in Arthur Magazine.
Texas Champion Trees: Rocky Mountain Ponderosa Pine – Davis Mountains Preserve – 15 February 2010
Rocky Mountain Ponderosa Pine, aka Western Yellow Pine
Pinus ponderosa
Circumference: 134 inches
Height: 110 feet
Crown spread: 46 feet
This Rocky Mountain Ponderosa Pine located in the Nature Conservancy’s Davis Mountains Preserve of Far West Texas is believed to be the largest known example of its kind left standing in the Lone Star state. It was added to the Texas Big Tree Registry in 2006.
More Into the Green in Texas:
