by Chas Bowie
Thursday July 30, 2009, 9:44 AM
Review: Amy Stein at Blue Sky Gallery and Catharine Stebbins at Newspace
Getting down
Silence and solitude overwhelm the low desert landscapes of Altadena, Calif., photographer Catharine Stebbins, on view at Newspace. Culled from her “Certain Places” series, the square compositions offer worm’s eye views of the land in soft, muted tones.
With her camera resting directly on the dry ground, Stebbins uses an evocatively shallow depth of field to render only a small slice of the photo in focus. In lesser hands, these would be little more than pretty nature pictures, but Stebbins works with a painterly sense of light and a poet’s sense of space and nature.
As if to argue against the majestic landscapes of fellow Californians Ansel Adams and Carleton Watkins, Stebbins’ photographs reveal very little of the land. But what she does show — the jazzy composition of a bramble patch, the bonsailike grandeur of a palm-sized stone and the dappled quality of early morning light on a cluster of sage leaves — are intimate spaces of profound and quiet beauty.
Newspace Center for Photography, 1632 S.E. 10th Ave.; 503-963-1935, www.newspacephoto.org. Hours: Monday-Thursday 10 a.m.-8 p.m., Friday-Sunday 10 a.m.-6 p.m., through Aug. 2.
© Catharine Stebbins "end no 2" 2006
BLOW-UP show at Bromfield Gallery reviewed in the Boston Globe
by Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent | August 6, 2008
EXTREME VIEWS
Of the two group shows now at Bromfield Gallery, a juried exhibit of photo-based work chosen by photographer Harvey Stein, is the better. The theme covers explosions, hugely pregnant women, inflatable toys, and weapons, and you’d think that would be all over the place, but because it’s all so extreme it hangs together beautifully. Highlights include Allison Jones’s “Karo Elder, Ethiopia,” showing a vividly painted Ethiopian holding up a machine gun, and Andy Bloxham’s “Beta 19,” in which the photographer seems to have caught a man in the act, examining his inflatable doll with a stethoscope in bed. Andy Holzman’s “Deluge,” a black-and-white photo, illuminates driving rain, looking like a shower of sparks over a boat’s prow.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
My image “edom no 2″ has been acquired by 4Culture, a Seattle public art initiative. As part of the Portable Collection: Landscapes, it will reside along with pieces by 33 other national artists in the Harborview Medical Center’s new Norm Maleng Building.
News Release
© Catharine Stebbins "edom no 2" 2005
PLACES show at drkrm reviewed in ARTScene
CONTINUING AND RECOMMENDED
Perhaps due to the absence of any human traces the lush color photographs by Catharine Stebbins seem somehow haunted. Without the reference to humanity, these intense images exist in a timeless place where weeds or grass or twigs or a ripple on water are the most significant things going. Addressing the overlooked within the immensity of the L. A. experience is not a new topic, but these 40″ x 40″ shallow focus images (referred to by stebbins as eco-tableau vivant and organic mise en scene) find their own elegant perspective (drkrm., Northeast Los Angeles).
ArtScene, Vol. 26, No.8, pg.50, April 2007