Artist Talk: Sam Krisch
Center for the Arts (0916), Virginia Tech 190 Alumni Mall, Blacksburg, Virginia 24061
Sam Krisch, Elements
Ruth C. Horton Gallery
The sheer power and splendor of nature in far-away places is the subject of Sam Krisch’s photographic practice. Over the last five years, Krisch has journeyed to remote locations ranging from the Mohave Desert to Antarctica to capture stunning images of ice formations, the raw force of turbulent waters, and empty expanses of desert landscapes. This exhibition presents a selection of the artist’s digital photographs created between 2013 and 2014, in which his approach to composition verges on the abstract, taking the work beyond documentation into a world of pristine, yet daunting, beauty. These are gorgeous, even idyllic landscapes, tinged nonetheless with the terrifying knowledge that these worlds are slipping away in an irreversible trajectory caused by human forces. Krisch lives and works in Roanoke. He is the adjunct curator of photography at the Taubman Museum of Art and curator of the Taubman’s upcoming exhibition, Paul and John Paul Caponigro: Generations.
Sam Krisch
Death Valley II, 2014
Archival pigment print
20 X 60 inches