SHOWCASE – March 2014

The Maine Museum of Photographic Arts presents work by Jeffery Becton

February, the Maine Museum of Photographic Arts (MMPA) opened an exhibition of works by photographer Jeffery Becton at the University of Southern Maine’s Glickman Family Library. The exhibition, A Singularity of Place, consists of 31 digital montages printed as archival pigment prints. According to MMPA Director Denise Froehlich, Becton’s montages are made up of a layering of regionally recognizable architecture and still objects that feel inherited or collected by former generations. “They are quiet and slow meditations on the existential that unfold only after patient viewing. It is with beguiling beauty that we are taken up by his alternate realities while his outside views turn our equilibrium inside out,” she says. Carefully constructed, the poetry of these compositions makes references to the sea, the subconscious, time, and the summer home. The borrowed color palette is from the ocean, the sky, and other natural scapes found in and around Becton’s Deer Isle home and homes of others on the Atlantic coast. “This makes the imagery as visually familiar in its vernacular as the New England accent is to our ear,” says Froehlich. Since 1990 Becton has worked in a medium he calls digital montage—a union of diverse visual elements in a composition, the original form of which is a digital file. “Combining primarily elements of photography as well as painting, drawing, and scanned materials, the techniques I use foster and give form to visual ambiguities, reexamining the boundaries of mixed media and creating altered realities that merge into images rich in symbolism both personal and archetypal,” says Becton. The MMPA is also working on a monograph of Becton’s work, which will be available on the website in 2015. On the following pages, MH+D presents a glimpse of A Singularity of Place.