directors lounge monthly screenings
karl f. stewart
impressions in mind
Photographs and Video
Thursday, 27 March 2014
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte
Karl F. Stewart makes a mark in digital photography and video with his saturated colors and his rigorous compositions showing urban landscapes. He works with a photographic hybrid combination between still images and videos that do not hide their origin in their photographic concept. After being a documentary photographer in the 70's in Pittsburgh, his home town, he worked as an English lecturer in Italy for 24 years, before he took up photography again only 5 years ago, now going fully digital.
San Francisco, his next temporary residency after Italy, became his starting point for his relaunch in photography, where he mostly explored the downtown area. Not just the financial district of San Francisco, but a big part of the highly dense urban areas show an amazing economic growth with glossy surfaces and artificial contemporary green landscaping on one hand, and wide spread poverty of homeless people on the other. "The Unearthly Beauty of Simulated Nature in Contemporary Architecture" is Stewart's most pronounced piece from that period, presented as a video-photo essay. At the same time, the artist started exploring motion-blur and photoshop cut-outs. "Impressions of Movement" is a series of panoramic works that resulted and which he continued in different countries such as USA, Italy and France. The time-based presentation of digital pictures, that seems to be natural to the medium, led to digital video as his preferred medium at the moment. The artist recently moved to Düsseldorf, where he continues exploring landscapes and urban settings in often unearthly colors. Like with "K-20", showing a small fountain at the K 20 Museum in Düsseldorf, the examinations of urban-nature relations combined with sometimes witty surprising experiments, seem to propel his creative energy most successfully.
Artist's Links:
http://kfstewart.com/
http://impressionsofmovement.com/
Press Links:
Z-Bar - http://www.z-bar.de/
Directors Lounge