[All work shown by Maria Bevilacqua]
Maria Bevilacqua has that observant, alert look that seasoned photographers acquire. Her work takes up half the wallspace in FMoPA's Community's New Visions Landscape themed show.
[Amy Martz's architectural details make up the other half.]
Bevilacqua's work is in varying long, wide. panoramic formats. This series began when she was traveling with an Holga medium format film camera, which has separate film transport and shutter release controls. She made several multiple exposures across where several frames would have been normally. They were developed, looked at, and put in a drawer, where they stayed for over five years.
Maria was born in Pittsburgh, to an amateur photographer father, and went to college in Indiana, where she graduated with an emphasis on painting and printing. Her family had a house in Florida, and they traveled frequently during her formative years.In between, there were two marriages, and significantly, photographic workshops with Duane Michals, whose photographic sequences laced with text are famous in the photographic world. He told her her goal should be "to change photography", a very high bar for anyone.
In these landscapes (including some in the city), not only are there multiple image overlays, all of them are in multiple POVs and perspectives as well, with their own rhythm.
A movie is a sequence of frames. A photograph is a slice of time stacked, These are both Conceptually similar to Chinese scrolls in many ways. Superficially, these are complex landscapes, but they are also innerscapes. Maria tells me they reflect on the photographer's personal emotional status, not in a direct, self-conscious manner, but in a transparent flow.
Maria's work comes from a painter's background more than a photographic one. This is evident in the subjects and themes. They are visually coherent, and have a smooth, creamy quality to them. Viewers are challenged to surrender conventional monotaxic, single perspective vision in order to enter these works, and are rewarded for it with resonant imagery that connects them with the artist and their own lives..
--- Luis
At FMoPA, closes on July 26th.
