“Midwest Horizons”, Rhondal Mckinney at Joseph Bellows Gallery

"Farm Landscapes" - 2010 - photo by Rhondal Mckinney

A selection of beautiful American landscapes eternalized by photographer Rhondal Mckinney during the '80s is being shown at Joseph Bellows gallery as "Midwest Horizons"; black and white photographs from a silent contemplation of the grandeur of the rural land. On view until January 25, 2019, in La Jolla California.

Maybe is the lifestyle on American countryside which represents from heart a way to see the world that encourages people to confront the difficulties of a standard consolidation of pursuits and future destinies with a more traditional point of view: a vision where hard working is the essence of existence and success.

Sometimes inclement and rough, farmers life goes along with the daily tasks that build the personality from and by the land. A depiction of phantom souls moving around while the pouring snow covers with its immensity the camps is print by the camera of the photographer. Green grass growing early in spring and trees tracing the sight with shadows in the morning at the moment when the sun is rising offers another depiction of a home where an afternoon with pumpkin pie is a signal of a good day.

In “Midwest Horizons”, Rhondal Mckinney catches the tattoos that machinery has left across the camps, singular marks occupying the view and articulating the new hairstyle of the land, a playful… a deep composition acting in central equilibrium of the photos. But the lines made by humans are not the only element to enrich the imagery: the snow, the trees and the dwarf houses lost in the middle of the pictures are part of the permanent beauty. The whiteness of the winter proposes a natural element that generates textures and contrast, sometimes acting like negative/positive space, snowed prairies fight with the survival plants to define the decorative wallpaper on the bottom of the composition. Decorative rhythmical insinuations of an abstract inner reality.

A group of 19 prints from the series Farm and Illinois landscapes which were taken at 80s decade, and a few the recent creation are part of the exhibition, a gallery proposition to try to extract the stories contained in imagery, because at the end, as in the beginning: roots and leafs are the real lords of the landscape, the direct connection with earth from which we breath.