In a front page living section story, the Telegram & Gazette featured Matthew Gamber, assistant professor of visual arts at the College of the Holy Cross, and his exhibit “Grammar” which is on display in the Cantor Art Gallery through Feb. 27. “Grammar” is a survey of Gamber’s recent works as he considers the complexity of photography as a language, using a variety of photographic processes to explore the meaning constructed around the medium and the rules that govern its use. “These are photographs, but not photographs in the traditional sense,” Gamber told the Telegram. “I’m thinking about the entire thought process that’s going on, whether it’s dealing with aspects of perception, aspects of technology and industry and things like that.” The exhibition includes non-traditional explorations of photography such as high-resolution photographs of blank, aged chalkboards, digital representations of broken glass, experiments with light-emitting objects, and a handful of parsley.
“If you photograph something with film there is the impression that it is nostalgic or romantic,” Gamber told the Telegram, “but it also somehow has this element of serving as evidence, that it’s less able to be tampered with, but in fact you can alter that very easily in ways that are invisible to the end product.” Gamber’s abstract experimentation with photo-sensitive paper pushed up against a television screen is an example of how his work extends the supposed “reality” of a photograph to what he calls “far subtler realms.”
“I really liked the idea of getting to know Matthew through his work,” Cantor Gallery director Roger Hankins told the Telegram, “and if I’m thinking that would be a really cool think then I’m also thinking that’s a really cool thing for our audience—our students, our faculty and our community members.”
More Information
- “Cantor Art Gallery to Exhibit ‘Grammar,’ Exploring the Complexity of Photography as Language.”
- ‘In The Studio.’
- “Grammar”: A Q&A with Professor and Artist Matthew Gamber
This “Holy Cross in the News” item is by Emma Collins ’16.
