WNYBAC - Exhibition Opening

An Opening Reception for The Ground, an exhibition by Tate Shaw

September 27 from 6-9:30pm at WNYBAC
On view September 27th – November 2nd, 2013

Tate Shaw is Director of the Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, New York, a nonprofit organization supporting photography and books with an accredited MFA program in association with The College at Brockport, SUNY. Shaw has contributed writings to the Journal of Artists’ Books (JAB), and Aperture’s The Photobook Review, amongst other publications. He routinely organizes public events including VSW’s monthly Visual Book Club and bi-annual Photo-Bookworks Symposium as well as exhibitions at such institutions as The Center for Book Arts, New York. He is co-publisher of Preacher’s Biscuit Books and his own work is held in many private and public collections of artists’ books internationally. Shaw has publicly performed his books nationally at institutions and gatherings like the Minnesota Center for the Book, Minneapolis; The Hybrid Book in Philadelphia; Action/Interaction at The Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts; and he has a forthcoming multi-media reading at The Western New York Book Art Center, Buffalo, NY in the fall of 2013.

The Ground is an essay book including photographs made between 2010 and 2012 in a geothermal area of Iceland and at hydrofracking sites in Tioga County, Pennsylvania, as well as writing that documents failures both personal and historical to access the ground as a source of energy and to grasp its power. Images from The Ground are failures in their own right made to show something of the futility of trying to fix an image on a ground in any permanent way. The photographs were printed with an inkjet printer on a heavy printmaking paper then water was applied to wash out areas of the ink. The results are then digitally scanned to make a new image. Water is a medium to access the core subject, as in the energy mining processes depicted. A geothermal power plant has boreholes drilled deep into the ground that converts steam under enormous pressure into energy. For fracking over ten thousand gallons of chemicals is mixed with over a million gallons of water and a heavy amount of sand is injected underground to release natural gas deposits.