Encore

Franklin & Marshall’s online cultural calendar

Signs of Life

November 12–December 11
Sally Mather Gibson Curriculum Gallery
Phillips Museum of Art
www.fandm.edu/phillipsmuseum

Artist’s Reception and Gallery Talk: November 12, 4:30–6:30 p.m.

This exhibition of large, aerial photographs by R. Scott Wright coincides with a retrospective exhibition of his work being shown at the Lancaster Museum of Art from Oct. 2 to Nov. 22.

Wright, visiting assistant professor of art and artist in residence at the Wohlsen Center for Sustainable Environment, is an aerial landscape painter who recognizes the elements he views from the open window of a helicopter as parts of the human body. He reinterprets the images in the studio, producing large and colorful works.

Wright’s research flights over farms, cities, rivers and bays reveal interwoven human and natural compositions unfolding beneath the helicopter blades.

“Signs of life are all around us in many guises,” Wright says. “I seek out places where the landscape takes on the appearance of vast abstract canvases, where humans and nature collaborate to generate living artwork based on layered patterns of growth, entropy and renewal.”

Signs of Life reflects the irony that humans are kin to nature. The same urge to survive and flourish that spawns rainforests on one end of the scale, Wright says, also constructs cities, superhighways, sprawl and climate change on the opposite end.

“For better or worse, humans, along with other life forms, occupy the same canvas—a patterned, multilayered and ever-changing canvas,” he says. “My art work questions whether our creativity and industry are actually personal-conscious acts, or if we are all participating in some kind of super choreographed and collaborative play of physics.”

In addition to Wright, Sarah Dawson, acting director of the Wohlsen Center, will speak at the reception and gallery talk Nov. 12.