‘POSTERN’
I have long been intrigued with landscape photography. I love the hauntingly beautiful and precisely described landscape photos made during the period of continental expansion, while I am also disturbed and saddened by the manner in which these images were instrumentalized to perpetuate false narratives about the vacant and available nature of the lands being portrayed. The history of the genre is complicated and complex; the contradictions contained in this history are part of the intrigue.
While I have been heavily involved in making pictures over the past few years, I have always felt that within the genre of landscape photography there is little room for me to say something novel, scant opportunity to add something meaningful to the conversation. And so the images that I have produced have not seen the light of day. The explorations represented here feel like a compromise between my interests in making pictures of interesting landscapes, making sculpture, and creating objects that are sensitive to their immediate environment.
On a very basic level, photography is and always will be about the interaction between medium and light. I am interested in the interactions of light and objects, the abstraction of the gathered ambient light of a given context within objects I have produced for this purpose, and the recording of this interaction through photographic processes. I am also interested in the idea that an object can give an abstracted representation of a moment, and an abstracted version of the light and color that exists beyond the frame; whether that frame be the periphery of the viewer or the bounds of the photographic image. These interests drove this exploration and the resulting objects and images.
Granite Calimpong
Granite Calimpong received a BFA in Interdisciplinary Computing in the Arts and Music from UCSD in 2007 and completed his MFA in Sculpture at the University of Washington in 2019. While a graduate student at UW he explored perception and various visual phenomena associated with illusions through the use of wood, clay, glass, photography, and metal. During the decade prior to attending the UW, Calimpong worked predominantly in glass, maintaining his own studio practice, assisting various renowned glass artists in the Seattle area, and working as a fabricator helping a number of non-glass artists realize their ideas in the medium.
Upon completion of his MFA, Calimpong took a position as a long term resident at Pottery Northwest. During his residency he engaged in an intense two years of exploration which served as an extension and continuation of his graduate work and also allowed him to reconnect with clay, which was his first material love. After mounting a solo show titled, Stolid, in January 2022, which coincided with the end of his PNW residency, Calimpong moved into a studio in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle where he has continued his explorations. Calimpong has had recent solo exhibitions at Traver Gallery in Seattle (July 2023) and at the Jam Factory in Adelaide, AUS (August 2023). In addition to his studio practice, Calimpong has taught extensively domestically including stops at Pilchuck Glass School, Haystack Mountain School, Penland School of Crafts, Pittsburgh Glass Center, and the University of Washington. Most recently, Calimpong taught two workshops in Australia at the Jam Factory in Adelaide and at the Canberra Glassworks.