Chris Mast exhibits four groups of work: two groups of pinhole photographs, three large scale gelatin silver prints from the Canadian Maritime series, a group of chromogenic photographs of architectural details, and inkjet prints from CAD drawings from three projects.
The pinhole photographs consist of six gelatin silver prints from the Summer Solstice series, and five chromogenic prints from the Las Vegas series. The Las Vegas series treats the urban space of Las Vegas as a nocturnal display of artificial illumination. The Summer Solstice prints, all from pinhole camera negatives made on the summer solstice, are of architectural details illuminated by intense light, emphasized by the contrast of the prints.
The chromogenic prints of large format camera images of architectural details address local color and the color temperature of the illuminants, relying on hue differentiation more than on value for articulation of form.
The three large scale gelatin silver prints from the Canadian Maritime series are distinguished from the other works in the exhibition by the softness of the ambient light, the overcast producing a uniform, almost omnidirectional light in which objects are rendered distinctly, yet without the conspicuous cast shadows of the Summer Solstice prints.
Mast's images, with the principle planes of the space photographed parallel to the image plane, and the absolute clarity produced by the large format negatives, have the effect of the closed form of Renaissance painting. 1 The airless space of these photographs is the space of human habitation, but the spaces are uninhabited in the photographs. In the long exposures required with pinhole cameras, human presence is frequently obviated unless persons are relatively stationary during the interval of exposure. In the conventions of architectural photographic illustration, the architectural work is typically described without persons in the photograph. Insofar as these photographs are regarded not as architectural illustration, but as artworks, the absence of human presence is disquieting, eliciting an estrangement analogous to De Chirico's paintings of airless urban spaces. More contemporary photographic parallels are found in the work of Edward Burtynsky, Michael Wolf, and Andreas Gursky, and in the still earlier work of Lewis Baltz and Bernd and Hilla Becher.
Beyond the delectation of hue and value, of form and structure, Mast's photographs elicit an interpretive viewer response that accounts for the being of the works as they are, of both what is present and absent in the images.
Chris Mast received the Master of Fine Arts from Southern Methodist University. He teaches photography in the Art Department at Brookhaven College.