Helms Bakery District Presents Photography by David Hartwell

In the Helms Design Center

Opening reception and presentation during Culver City Art Walk and Roll Festival.

Exhibition Dates:
October 14th, presentation 3:00 – 3:45 pm followed by reception.
October 14th – November 17th by appointment

In photography, the circle of confusion determines the depth of field, the part of an image that is acceptably sharp. Artist photographer David Hartwell sets his sights and lenses on the myriad of plants and flowers that inhabit his garden in Pasadena. David’s art and craft consists of taking hundreds of photographs of each specimen. Inching himself closer to his subject a fraction of a millimeter at a time, David ends up with images only differentiated by the location of their razor thin focus point, the circle of confusion. With the aid of AI and a lot of manual post production David reassembles those photos into images that are impossibly sharp, blurring the boundaries of illustration, photography and the stored visual memory. This circumvention of the limitations of the lens –the human eye having the same constraints –allows David to physically emulate what the human brain does: synthesize information into a coherent whole. The images are conspicuously simple and familiar yet the resulting amalgams have never been seen by a photographic lens, nor the human eye.

David Hartwell is a British citizen. He was born and raised in Switzerland where he studied photography and obtained his BFA from Art Center College of Design’s European campus (1991) He is also an accomplished animator, CG artist and color grader. His work has shown at the Palm Springs Art Museum, WUHO Gallery in Hollywood, the Wende Museum of the Cold War, National Gallery of the Cayman Islands, National Museum of China in Beijing, 798 Arts District Beijing, EPFL University Gallery in Lausanne Switzerland.

Hartwell will present his most recent work which blurs the boundaries of photography, illustration and the stored visual memory. He will give a presentation about his work and process from 3:00 to 3:45 pm October 14th followed by a reception.

double-bang.com
instagram.com/hightechfolkart
hartwelldavid.com

Free