Nan Brown & Richard Gilles in May

Viewpoint’s May exhibit, on the walls from May 11 through June 2, features photographs by Richard Gilles and Nan Brown, two artists who take a close and affectionate look at what many might consider “trashy” elements of our environment.

Nan Brown has steadfastly pursued the art, craft, and profession of photography over the last four decades. Her rich photographic history includes college studies and college teaching, workshops with many of the West Coast masters, working in photographers’ studios and opening her own studio. Confronted with serious illness, she “pared back to the essentials: first, raising my children, and second, creating art.”

Brown’s exhibit features photographs of trailers. “I photograph what I care about,” she says, and “I like trailers … they have an abandoned-appliance look that appeals to me — metal, mobile, and disposable. They often seem both at odds and at one with their environment — at odds because of their unapologetic artificiality juxtaposed to the surrounding forest or ranch, and at one because they suggest the individualism and freedom intrinsic to American rural life.”

Brown’s style in this work is deliberately plain, but not in a way that is dismissive of her subject. “The square, dead-on format … repetitious camera position and crop de-emphasize ‘artistic’ or ‘photographic’ points of view and instead emphasize trailer variety so that, portrait-like, personality and imagined histories are revealed. The elegant whites and silvers of the trailers are well served by the traditional silver-rich emulsion.”

Color, on the other hand, is an essential aspect of the work Richard Gilles entitles The Powder Plant Power Plant. “On the edge of the San Francisco Bay sits an abandoned and decaying power plant,” he writes. “This plant has become an environmental canvas and playground for young anonymous artists [who] have transformed a scene of decay in to a wonderland of color and shape. With these photographs my attempt is to capture the sense of amazement and wonder I experienced when first stumbling on this scene. Returning many times to the plant to photograph, I am amazed at the continued transformation.”

As Helen A. Harrison wrote in The New York Times, “A trip down the rabbit hole might lead to the abandoned power plant … that Richard Gilles eulogizes in a series of handsome panoramas.”

For more about Richard Gilles and his work, visit www.hues.com.