Ordinary Dancers and Selected Portraits

Description

The Photolab Gallery presents an exhibit of color and black & white photographs by Berkeley photographer Sheila Newbery. The exhibit is free, accessible and open to the public.

The reception for the artist is on Saturday, January 16th at 3pm to 5pm.

The artist says of her work: Ordinary Dancers is a series that takes contact between individuals as a starting point, a given. The dancers aren’t professionals, they’re ordinary people, yet when I watch them, I’m moved by their attitudes, the essential gentleness of their motions; and I imagine that dancing is the closest one may come to a physical state of grace. Dancing is both an intimate and a social act: it’s about immersion in the enveloping qualities of music, rhythm and motion. The needs it meets are primal.

In a sense, these photographs are the antithesis of portraiture: in portraits we look for minute muscular inflections, particularly in a face. You won’t find that in these dancers. Their larger patterns of movement actually relieve the face of its telegraphic obligations, and the look of abstraction we often see on them is one of relaxation. The calm imparts an archaic aspect to the figures, linking them in my mind to much older, representations of dancers: those from urns, frescos, or codexes.

More Info

Link

http://www.photolaboratory.com/gallery_page_archive/sheilane...

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510 644 1400

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