As our planet tilts away from the sun and the days grow shorter, you realize just how much everything depends on those little photons.
If, like me, you are already missing the daylight — or even planning for Hanukkah, whose troubling military origins led to the holiday’s transformation to a festival of lights — and you want to express your appreciation and wonder for the photons, do I have a show for you to see as we hurtle toward the winter solstice.
Colin Burke, the New Haven-based photographer, is showing “Rays of Light: 12 Minutes to 12 Months” at Southern Connecticut State College. It runs at the Lyman Art Gallery in the lobby of the Lyman Performing Arts Center at the college through Dec. 18.
Burke speaking at the show’s opening.
Burke goes back to the basics of an art form of which the essential material is light. He’s showing several large cyanotypes, which are photo prints taken without a camera.
They are often called photograms and go back to the earliest days of photography. Because the chemicals involved turn paper or fabric blue, early copying needs were often fulfilled in this manner, creating the eponymous “blueprints.”
On display in the curving gallery of the Lyman Center of Performing Arts off Crescent Street are several cyanotypes — mural-size images of a shopping cart and a dress form.
A self-described artist who uses “antique photographic processes,” Burke created his cyanotypes as his predecessors did going on two centuries ago. He spread chemicals on large swatches of fabric and exposed them to light. As the light interacted with the chemicals, the exposed areas turned a cerulean blue, except for the shopping cart he wrestled with and the dress form standing upon the fabric, which became white.
The exposures took about 12 minutes.
That’s a quick snapshot compared to images that Burke has also captured in the other type of work in the show: photographs made through pinhole cameras that Burke built and left in place for month upon month. He recorded shifts in clouds, weather, the trails of insects or planes that might cross the path of the camera’s tiny eye.
The images derived from these pinhole, or camera obscura devices, are aesthetically more like a puzzle to be solved or deciphered than an object to get pleasure from viewing.
Nevertheless, if you give yourself enough time, as you peer through the (unfortunate for viewing) thick glass of the display cases to decode the images, it is a source of wonder to think about how light, given enough time, is the artist who made what you are seeing.
This of course is the case in all photographic processes, but the Hand of Light is very legible here, and humbling
The one large cyanotype of of a ghostly human figure struggling with a humble but daunting shopping cart is at once amusing and time-traveling in its effect.
And what an interesting place to exhibit this show. The SCSU mascot owl, a creature of the darkness, welcomes you from its perch as you enter. The curvature of the gallery is somehow a reminder that — per Albert Einstein, that other connosieur of light — space and time have curvature as well.
Moreover, Burke’s pieces of long-lasting ephemera seem to be facing off with dozens of small-framed posters of past speakers and performers at the college — from Billy Joel to Madelaine Albright — as if to pair, on one side, the quotidian, and on the other, the eternal.
