Statement

Urban Abstracts

My intent is to explore uncommon collisions of color, form and scale within architecture. I want to rattle the bones of a building, shake common perceptions of concrete reality. I want the temporal elements shifting between both the original architecture and my imagination. I see immense potential dividing line, establishing pattern and color as new visual possibilities. For me the division of line is paramount. The original geometric intentions of structure degrade, line will wander, spaces and color create new context. These images show a world off kilter, where conventional space is fraught; as if caught between positive ends of magnets.

Committed to lens based capture I have ask myself the question. What is visually possible with new cutting edge technologies and software and how can I apply it to my work? Within that question this project was born. From a background as an architectural view camera photographer I found an independent language between the structural impossibilities of M.C. Escher and the complex color spaces of Richard Diebencorn. Throughout my career as an artist my guiding premise, from Minor White, has always been, photograph something not for what it is but for what it can become.

Bernard C. Meyers

Palimpsest

As I walked the streets of Cusco and Puno the walls were verdant, shouting out the stain of third world. I witnessed the brash, the faded, the layers and inklings of all unwilling to be denied, silent screams for recognition. I took notice of this layered epistle, the unseen light among the dirty shadows.

This is a codex of time, past and present, tattered and torn. The melding moments born from sun and rain, all evidence, the trace resignations that life can bring. I see cautionary tales of promotion and poverty, politics and people, grit and grime the life cycles, palimpsests posted on the walls of urban Peru. 

Between Worlds

“To fathom mystery, one must plunge into its depths or be graced by an

encounter with that hidden vortex at the dim edges of life.”

Paul Caponigro'

When is a photograph not a photograph but something more? How does

an image exceed the territories between reality and metaphor? When and where

are the roots of creativity, of heightened awareness, of a higher consciousness?

How do I enter into and explore these hinterlands at will? I began asking these

questions with my graduate thesis and have scrutinized them for decades.

I am enamored with the surprises of light and structure. The space and

presence, the undulation and beguiling ways light moves through glass, plastic

and screen, the overlap of one dimension into another, the complications

between layers and what lies beyond the realm of reality. The narrative here is

explores an illusive place, the vantage point between the world of our

constructed socialized realities and everything else beyond.

These images these moments are akin to a waking dream, a spiritual

experience that ventures into other realms of consciousness. Philosophers, clerics

and physicists all flirt with the idea that we function on more than one plane of

existence simultaneously — that acceptance alone opens the door, the possibility

of other worlds. Through my images I am looking for the key, the algorithm, a

secret garden, for the east gate of the tabernacle. I know only now that these

doors can open anywhere at any time. I need only to lose my own importance, to

silence any internal conversations simply to stop, sense and see. More often than

not I find myself within the veil, separate realities at every side.

These are all “straight” photographs. My hope is that these transcend the

everyday, the documentary, to become something more, ripe with intrigue and

mystery. I embrace ambiguity and the abstract as a gateway to the unknown. At

best, I wander its intricate edges. Most of all I pray these images provide some

tangible experience, a diaphanous glimpse into the boundaries between worlds

Bernard C. Meyers