LBCC SSH Gallery Exhibits Motion Photography by Kurt Norlin and Jeff Hess

Top image: Jeff Hess "and they came upon a forest"
Bottom image: Kurt Norlin "Solar Transit"

An exhibit of motion-based photography entitled Dancing with Light, Painting with Time by Kurt Norlin and Jeff Hess will be on display at South Santiam Hall Gallery at Linn-Benton Community College, 6500 Pacific Blvd. SW, Albany, February 3 to March 17.

The artists for this exhibit of colorful abstract photography both use motion blur as the basis for the mark-making in their imagery. However, they create their images in distinctly different, even opposite ways.

Norlin, retired LBCC photography instructor and Albany artist, creates his painterly photographs using a technique called “ICM,” or Intentional Camera Movement.

Using a digital camera and pinhole lens, combined with deliberate, subtle camera movement, Norlin creates visual elements which he then layers and combines in Photoshop to create his final image. As Norlin says of his own process, “Part science, part art, and part ritual, the process allows me to literally draw with light.”

Hess is a Corvallis photographer who does almost the exact opposite thing to create his graceful photographic impressions. The work included in this exhibit is of a series he refers to as “temporal painting.”

In it, Hess applies “brushstrokes of light” via the movement of natural materials–such as grains, leaves, petals, or berries–in front of a stationary camera. Each image is a single exposure of the camera that records the flight of the objects through space.

Norlin and Hess will share more about their process and ideas at an artist reception held in the gallery Wednesday, Feb. 17 from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. The reception is free and open to the public. Food and beverages provided.

SSH Gallery is open Mondays through Fridays from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. More information about LBCC Art Galleries can be found at www.linnbenton.edu/artgallery.