Boston based Blog WHAT YOU WILL REMEMBER Editor Suzanne Revy reviewed the CAM exhibition Quarry Art.

By Suzanne Révy

Granite is an igneous rock formed from cooling magma and is common in the earth’s continental crust. It has been mined for centuries to be used in erecting buildings or paving roads. In the 19th century, the granite industry flourished on Cape Ann in Massachusetts, but fell out of favor after the development of asphalt and the economic depression of the 1930’s, leaving gaping holes in the earth. They filled with water and became somewhat risky places for local children to explore and swim. To celebrate the opening of a new annex at the Cape Ann Museum, former Boston Globe reporter and photographer David Arnold invited local artists Tsar Fedorsky, Albert Glazier, Paul Cary Goldberg, Skip Montello, Olivia Parker, Martin Ray, Katherine Richmond, Steve Rosenthal and Constance Vallis to photograph the quarries that dot the landscape in and around Gloucester and Cape Ann.  “QuarryArt” is on view at the Janet & William Ellery James Center at the Cape Ann Museum Green through July 30th, 2023.

The exhibition unfolds through the eyes of each artist and throughout the seasons. Some of the work feels architectural in its construction, some are ephemeral, and others revel in form and texture. A few are postcard views with bright blue skies, while Katherine Richmond’s tall waterfall affixed to the wall offers a visual break in the rhythm of the installation. Each photographer has four pictures in the show, and Richmond’s work includes a refreshing underwater black and white image featuring two swimmers among the granite outcroppings and revealing the ephemeral nature of human life compared to the eternal presence of the stone.

Quarries are beautiful to behold, but the brutality of their birth can be felt in the gashes and ribbons of color on their walls. Thousands worked these mines, pounding the earth to extract material. But the legacy of that hard work has been eroded, and nature seems to be reclaiming the gaping wounds left behind when the industry dried up. Martin Ray’s tree bursting with fall foliage is clearly thriving in a narrow plot of soil, and remarkably, Albert Glazier’s Foothold features a tree seeming to grow from a sheer cliff of solid granite. Olivia Parker’s early spring blooms and brambles in four pictures made at Halibut Point soften the surrounding solid rock. And the water that fills the base of a quarry can be as still as glass, reflecting the towering walls as in Skip Montello’s “True Reflection.”

Paul Cary Goldberg and Steve Rosenthal frame their pictures architecturally, particularly in  “Blood Ledge Quarry #1” by Goldberg and in “Quarry Structure #1” made in 1995 by Rosenthal. The long mid-tonal range in Goldberg’s picture is a sublime study of of the weight the earth carries. Rosenthal’s  frame in frame composition brings the organic tree branches into a conversation with the inorganic and seemingly immovable stones.

Constance Vallis and Tsar Fedorsky bring an abstraction to their studies of the quarries. Vallis’ use of chiaroscuro reduces the sturdy rock to pure light as if it is an extraterrestrial planet in space, while Fedorsky infuses something of her own humanity into her pictures. In one untitled image, a “face” emerges from the boulder that recalls New Hampshire’s “Old Man on the Mountain,” a famous granite outcropping that fell in 2003. It was perched atop a mountain for millennia, and Fedorsky’s picture is a reminder of the vastness of geologic time in her succinct composition.

The textures, striations and implied passages of time in the walls of the quarries are like cat-nip for photographers. These places love to be photographed, and to view the same subject matter through the eyes of nine different artists can be an illuminating exercise to understand both the subject matter and the point of view each photographer brings.

Here’s the link to the blog. https://www.whatwillyouremember.com/quarryart-cape-ann-museum-gloucester-ma/

When quarries are the photographic quarry

In Gloucester, 9 photographers look at the remains of a once- thriving Cape Ann industry.

By Mark Feeney Globe Staff, Updated June 27, 2023, 11:47 a.m.

GLOUCESTER – “QuarryArt” is a double-edged title. The show consists of, yes, art about quarries: 37 photographs by nine photographers, with various Cape Ann stone quarries as their subject. That’s the more obvious meaning of quarry art. The other is that, as so many of the images show, the quarries themselves are a kind of art.

What we see is a violation of the land, the residue of literal gouging for profits. Yet what remains behind has a stark and unmistakable beauty. The quarries are a version of Earth art, land art, environmental art — take your pick — long before the terms existed.

“QuarryArt” is at the Cape Ann Museum Green. It runs through July 30. Note that CAM Green is slightly more than a mile away from the museum’s main site, in downtown Gloucester. It’s a five-minute drive or not-unpleasant 20- minute walk. Speaking of not-unpleasant, admission is free. It’s open Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays.

The exhibition is in the Janet & William Ellery James Center, one of four buildings on the CAM Green campus. The gallery space is airy and unfussy: high ceiling, exposed ducts and pipes, everything painted white. The spareness suits the photographic subject matter.

Boston Globe readers of a certain age and with a good memory might remember the byline of David Arnold, the show’s curator. His introductory description is splendidly concise: “Nine photographers, one year, the theme of quarries. Photographing on private land required permission. Otherwise, no constraints.” It’s an ideal aesthetic brief: enough guidance for direction, but only a bare minimum. Here’s what we want you to look at, but look at it however you wish.

Stone quarrying began on Cape Ann in the 1830s (the same decade that gave the world photography). There were as many as 60 working quarries in the area, some as deep as 150 feet. At times, quarrying employed some 1,200 workers. The Great Depression put an end to the industry there. Its legacy remains visible today, these awful yet also magnificent gashes in the land.

The photographs here from both Tsar Fedorsky and Constance Vallis are in black and white and verge on abstraction. Certainly, with their combination of stoniness and void, quarries can lend themselves to such an approach. They’re visually otherworldly, the extraction of stone making a piece of the natural world into a form of artifice.

Paul Cary Goldberg and Steve Rosenthal’s photos are also all in black and white, though neither’s pictures at all tend to abstraction. There’s nothing abstract about the sight of a “No Swimming” sign in Goldberg’s “At Manship Quarry” or of swimmers in “Steel Derrick Quarry.” There’s no sign of a human presence in “Blood Ledge Quarry #1.” Instead, it stands out among the general horizontality of the images in the show for its upthrust of stone.

Rosenthal is best known as an architectural photographer, and a picture like “Quarry Island” emphasizes the structural quality found in this balance of stone, vegetation, and water. There’s a deeply pleasing sense of repose. Here and in two other of his pictures, “Quarry Reflections” and “Quarry Edge With Ladder” there’s a juxtaposition of the solidity and strength of stone with the softness and transparency of water — except, of course, it’s water that erodes stone, not the other way around.

One of the revelations “QuarryArt” has to offer is the chromatic range to be found in what one might have assumed to be a chromatically drab subject. Albert Glazier’s quarry photographs recall Richard Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park”paintings: the sense of organic geometry, the delicacy of color, the fracturings of the picture plane. The use of color by Skip Montello and Martin Ray is no less attractive.

The dusting of snow in Montello’s “Flat Ledge Winter” and the melting ice in Ray’s “Winter Thaw, Babson Farm Quarry, Halibut Point” are reminders of how the look of quarries can change with the seasons. That’s the point Olivia Parker makes with her four color photographs at Halibut Point, though there the change is within a season. The shift from April 16 to May 5 can be quite startling.

Goldberg’s “No Swimming” sign is an implied reminder of that. Katherine Richmond’s “Swimmers” goes from implication to demonstration. From source of extractive profit to facility for human recreation is no small transformation. But as “QuarryArt” reminds us again and again, the quarries are undergoing a much more significant transformation.

This is a show of stark, austere beauty, the austerity imparting a singular quality to that beauty. It’s also a show at once chastening and encouraging. The chastening comes from the reminder that nature, given enough time, will have its way with man’s handiwork. The encouraging also comes from that reminder. Swimming holes are one thing. Saplings emerging from rock is another and even better thing. Or as Parker writes, “I’m amazed at the way nature is changing man’s exploitation of the land into a new natural world. From the violence of blasting and drills a landscape of great beauty is emerging.”

QUARRYART

At Cape Ann Museum Green, 13 Poplar St., Gloucester, through July 30. 978- 283-0455, www.capeannmuseum.org

I’m very pleased to be part of this Lenscratch Edition “The Favorite photograph you took in 2023 Online Exhibition” with my photograph Swimmers.

LENSCRATCH is an online platform who is dedicated, supportive, and celebrates the photographic arts with communication, exposure, discussion, and community collaboration, and education. They aim to reflect the many voices and perspectives in the world wide photographic community and seeks to uplift artists who will shape the photographic medium. www.Lenscratch.com