Northampton photographer Pamela Cobb's landscape photographs are showing at the Western New England University Art Gallery through April 11th. Â
SPRINGFIELD - You may have seen the subjects for Northampton photographer Pamela Cobb’s art on your commute to work or while driving to the grocery store. You've passed them without blinking an eye.
Cobb sees the beauty and ambiguity in everyday objects found in nature, such as a snow bank behind Trader Joe’s in Hadley or a rock in the sand.
“A kind of landscape that I’m really drawn to is the nonevent landscape, something that you might walk by and not notice; it’s just a gulch or a crevasse," she explains. "But I like to focus on forms of the landscape, if it’s that curving form or a separation of the earth or a peak or meadow, all these different places to be in the landscape that when they’re photographed, especially when they’re made that big, they’re more monumental than they actually are in reality. But that’s the power of the photograph: it brings importance to a place.â€
Pamela Cobb is inspired by landscapes, and making the subject of her photographs ambiguous in size and space. Â
Her photography exhibit ‘Illusions of Place’ is on display at the art gallery at Western New England University through April 11.
The exhibit includes images of rocks from Maine to Wyoming to Maine, but all have a sense of ambiguity in their actual size and place.
Cobb has been practicing photography since eighth-grade, she said. After completing her undergraduate degree at Kenyon College in Ohio, she studied photography at the San Francisco Art Institute, where the drama of the California landscape inspired her.
“What appear to be this huge mountain range or a vast, desert-like place is actually here, is actually downtown Northampton. You can create illusion with photography by what you choose to show and what you don’t show. I’ve lived in Northampton for six and a half years and really miss the west coast, and I wanted to find something that could create the feeling of space and scale of a photograph taken in Death Valley, say. I don’t call them piles of snow; I call them by what I imagine them to be, which is a mountain,†said Cobb.
The landscape is given further ambiguity with black-and-white photos, and no other objects present to lend scale to the landscape.
Cobb has taken photographs around the country, from Death Valley to Wyoming to Northampton. Â
While Cobb enjoys seeing her photographs come to life in a large print format, her favorite part of the process is finding her subjects, whether driving in her car or hiking through fields, she said.
Cobb is showing 16 photographs in total, with work ranging from 2003 to 2012 and landscapes from all over the country.
The Western New England University Art Gallery at 1215 Wilbraham Road is located in the St. Germain Campus Center. The gallery is open free to the public weekdays from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. and on weekends from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
http://www.masslive.com/living/index.ssf/2013/04/northampton_photographer_pamela_cobb_works_to_create_beauty_space_ambiguity_in_landscapes.html
