|
Published by Light Press
Inc, Beyond Worlds Publishing Inc, copyright Hillsboro OR 1989, stated
First Edition. Having a 4 page introduction, followed by 56 large color
plates, and concluding with 2 page essay, artists notes and chronology. Finding
inspiration in a heap of discarded scraps of metal left to weather in a sculpture yard at the University of California,
Berkeley, Dunitz photographed the jagged, rusty remnants, capturing an unexpected range of brilliant colors created by the material's oxidation. Thoroughly abstract, the eerie, iconic shapes had all the power of sun-baked ancient ruins. But Dunitz wasn't satisfied. "Rather than just collecting things and photographing them," he recalls. "I wanted to manipulate surfaces."
By 1984 he had begun the process used to create Pacific Light, in which Dunitz standing - in running shoes and latex gloves - on a foam pad, holding a paintbrush wired into a nearby power supply. Dipping this brush into an electrolyte mixture of water and baking soda, he then attacks the surface of sheets of reactive metals (steel, titanium, niobium, or tantalum). Electricity flows through the brush to the metal: by changing the voltage, he manipulates the layers of oxidation and, in turn, the colors - 30 volts for light blue, 60 for fuchsia, 100 for kelly green. Intermittently, he etches grooves and scratches into the surface with a grinder or wire brush. But it's the last step in the process, the photography, that gives Dunitz's work its shadows, turbulence, and dreamlike mystery. After weeks of exploring the plate's surfaces and toying with as many as 30 lights to illuminate one evocative image, Dunitz takes his
photographs, producing these remarkable images. Bound in black cloth 16.5
by 13.5 inch hard covers, still in original dust jacket showing minor
wear, otherwise binding still
internally tight and strong, contents clean and bright, and overall in
very good condition.
.
(text taken from
introduction...)
A brilliance of light and color plays against the dark, impassive shadows of Jay Dunitz's Pacific Light series, at once enormously seductive to the eye and evocative to the mind. We imagine ourselves gazing into a submarine landscape, a darkened tropical rain forest filled with exotic flora, or a night sky shot through with the fluorescence of the aurora borealis, and are dazzled by the color and sheer, lightning energy of visual activity.
Conditioned by Modernism's distrust of beauty and its rejection of
pictorially, our response after this first delighted impulse may be a hesitant one. If we accept the challenge of these images, though, and penetrate their surface, they reveal disturbing depths and a striking paradox. Highly dependent on technical perfection, their fragile, reflective sheen seems calculated to reject our approach in every way. Yet their content is insistently inviting - warm, expressive and personal. They are playful, vulnerable, open to fantasy and chance.
It is in the extremity of this paradox, between the high-tech presentation and the emotional and spiritual quality of the images, that Dunitz's work becomes convincing and compelling. For Dunitz they remain mysterious, even magical. "I like to lose myself in these passages," he says. "I create each to be complete, but not completely known." It is not surprising, then, that Dunitz chooses photography to explore the ambiguous border between reality and illusion, even between life and death.
A restless student, Jay Dunitz made his way from the Kansas City Art Institute to Hampshire College, and finally to the San Francisco Art Institute, where he received a BFA in 1978. Along the way, through classes in drawing, sculpture, painting and photography, he developed the feel for color and texture that remains evident in his work to this day. Throughout this period, however, he was unable to find what he was really searching for - the means to express the core of his creative impulse....
.
.
...
|
Back to Search Results
) 
Print
Report item
and your 