From the Ground Up: The Tent Camera Photographs of Abelardo Morell

From the Ground Up:

The Tent Photographs of Abelardo Morell

Hallucinatory in their beauty, these elegant composites of the solid and perceived – of the concrete and the conceptual – of the sky and the earth, comprise the new exhibition by the well-known and endlessly inquisitive photographer, Abelardo Morell.
You haven’t seen pictures quite like this before. These are implausible and delightful picture puzzles, with intertwining realities that are at once an exercise of mind as well as spirit. With subtle, often impressionistic color palettes, each photograph is a pair of views overlapping themselves. Through a periscopic lens at the roof of a tent, that itself functions like a simple oversized pinhole camera – the world outside streams in. Inside the enclosed tent, the artist, utilizing hours-long exposures focuses his camera then leaves behind – capturing an inverted, dreamlike/realist rendering on the ground itself. The resulting image, one of co-mingled values, colors and patterns, can defy a quick study. Instead, the viewer is invited to explore these intriguing plays on perception, disentangling and re-weaving the connective tissues. These are meditative but playful, experiments which embrace an array of ideas about the interplay of form and function and of subject versus object – all the while tipping the hat to the long and rich history of the photographic medium that made it all possible.
Welcome down the rabbit hole.