Curious Details: Photographs by Cindy Stokes

Artist's Statement:

"I photograph what I notice, and what I notice tends to be the curious details of the world. This leaning draws on my formal training in chemical engineering and its application to biomedical research, where many hours in the lab taught me to observe the world closely. Having worked in academia and biotechnology for more than fifteen years, I now focus primarily on photography while consulting in bioengineering part-time.

My attraction to the intimate view sometimes leads to close-up but quite recognizable still-lifes, from the elegant gesture of a leaf's curl to the looming shadows of little nails. Frequently, though, my inclination towards abstraction takes the lead. The uncertainty of abstracts speaks to me, and for me. While the literal uncertainty is about subject, material, or scale, more interesting to me is our emotional uncertainty in response to something that's not quite recognizable.

The photographs in this exhibition are from both natural and manmade environments. The images from nature, made from 1996 to the present, reflect my attraction to the universal patterns and forms that arise in nature and the forces that give rise to them. I began photographing manmade environments in 2007 in rural Nevada as I wandered around some of its abandoned towns, home-sites, mines and mills. The structures and artifacts at these sites are made interesting by their accumulation of time and weather, along with the mystery of who's lived and worked there at some time past. Together, these bodies of work reflect many things I find to be curious and beautiful, no matter how they came to be.

All of the photographs were made with medium format or 35 mm black-and-white film. The photographs in the hallways are selenium-toned, silver gelatin prints that I print in a traditional darkroom. The large photographs in the lobby were printed using LightJet and inkjet technology from digital scans of the negatives."