Arthur Tress
Photographs from ‘The Tao of Physics’ Series
December 15, 2004 – March 13, 2005
National Academy of Sciences
Entrance at 2100 C St, NW
Artist’s Reception:
Sunday, March 13, 2005, 1:00 – 2:30 p.m.
(Reception precedes free concert by the Mendelssohn
String Quartet with Robert Mann, violist)
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Untitled, 1983, silver gelatin print
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Arthur Tress is an influential and prolific photographer whose career spans nearly half a century. He is noted for helping to bridge the gap between documentary and surrealistic photography. Born in New York City in 1940, his earliest subjects included Coney Island’s freak shows and the dilapidated grounds of the 1939 World’s Fair. From these beginnings, he developed his life-long fascination with surrealism, social issues, and humor. Although he is best known today for his series of staged still-life tableaux, this body of work from 1983 offers a rare glimpse of his investigations into pure abstraction.
Inspired by his visualization of physical phenomena, Tress arranged found objects on textured backgrounds, such as cement, plastic, snow, and sand. He spray-painted these constructions to create layered patterns and then photographed the results. Tress strived to “find rich symbolic meaning in pattern, not just merely the decorative, and its correlation to science and the search for the fabric of the universe” in these skillfully executed interpretations. He drew source material for his abstractions from a range of art movements and cultures including Russian Constructivism, Tibetan prayer woodcuts, and stenciling techniques of the late nineteenth-century architect, Louis Sullivan.
Titles of the photographs in this series were selected from the index of Fritjof Capra’s seminal book, The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism, and were chosen not to describe the images, but to interact with them.
Tress’s photographs are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2001, the Corcoran Gallery of Art featured a retrospective of his work entitled Arthur Tress: Fantastic Voyage: Photographs 1956-2000 which took an intimate look at his long and varied career.
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