Newsletters: Corden|Potts Gallery Showing the work of Photographer John Chervinsky

The fall art season is upon us and we're excited to tell you that we'll be showing Studio Physics and An Experiment in Perspective, the work of photographer John Chervinsky. John is a trained engineer who, in addition to his photography, works in the field of applied physics at Harvard's Rowland Institute for Science, originally founded by Polaroid's Edwin H. Land. The exhibit will run from September 5 to November 2. John will be in town for a reception, on Thursday, October 3 from 5:30 to 7:30 pm.

Corden|Potts Gallery is located at 49 Geary Street, Suite 410, in San Francisco. Gallery hours are Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 am to 5:30 pm and until 7:30 pm on the first Thursday of the month.

In explaining his Studio Physics series John says, "I am fascinated by the concept of time. I can measure it, account for it in an experiment in the lab, and live my life in it, but I still don't know what it is exactly."

The great pioneering time and motion studies done by practitioners such as Eadweard Muybridge, Harold "Doc" Edgerton, and even the experimental work of Berenice Abbott done during the late 1950s at MIT investigate motion with image capture intervals ranging from 100 nanoseconds (the time of the pulse of a fast strobe) to the several seconds it takes for a horse to trot in front of a reference grid. In fact, most contemporary photographers work somewhere within that range. "What would happen then," asks John, "if we decided to work outside of that range? What would happen if we picked an image capture interval of not seconds, but weeks?"

This conceptual project investigates the physical phenomena of still and moving objects in space over time. In making this work, which is an on-going project, John's first step is to compose and photograph a still life. He then crops an area of the image and sends it to a painting factory in China. The next step is to wait for an anonymous artist in China to complete an actual oil painting of the cropped section, and send it to him in the mail. After he receives the finished painting he inserts it into the original setup and re-photographs the still life.

"As with previous work, I'm interested in issues relating to perspective. I'm interested in the tensions expressed in the comparison between reality vs. representation. I'm interested what happens when I collaborate with other artists who have no idea they are involved in a collaboration, and I'm interested in seeing and expressing subtle changes over time that we might otherwise take for granted," John explains.

Talking about his earlier series, An Experiment in Perspective, John says, "Lenses and cameras are the tools of the trade for a working photographer but it is the field of optics, as it relates to human vision, that provides the possibilities." For this series, he worked in his attic studio with a pair of blackboards--one vertical and one horizontal. Using only light that came through a single window, he pointed his large-format view camera toward the intersection of the two slates to record chalk markings, combined with real objects.

"I employ a mixed-media approach with found and constructed objects as sculptural elements, while using chalk drawing as a spatial tool," he explains. "I intend for these images to appear as imaginary, or even whimsical science demonstrations or physics experiments, complete with diagrammatic embellishment. They are not intended to be scientifically factual; they are reflective of the ongoing philosophical debates that have raged for centuries."

"I see An Experiment in Perspective as posing questions without easy answers," he says. "My intent is not to express a single narrow perspective, but to, among other things, expose the pitfalls of doing so."

John Chervinsky is a self-taught photographer and an engineer working in the field of applied physics. Since it first opened at the Griffin Museum of Photography in 2005, his Experiment in Perspective series has been traveling the country including solo exhibits at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory Art Gallery, Batavia IL; Michael Mazzeo Gallery, NYC; and Blue Sky Gallery, Portland OR. His work is held in numerous public and private collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Art, Portland OR; and Fidelity Investments Collection. John spent eighteen years running a particle accelerator at Harvard University and has collaborated with museums, using accelerator technology in the analysis of art.

We hope that you'll be able to stop in to see John's unique work. And please mark your calendar for our reception on October 3.

Liz and Jan