October 6, 2016 – January 1, 2017
Friends and fellow Mid City Artists, Michael Crossett and Charlie Gaynor, share a passion for capturing the aesthetic that defines city life. Inner City Hues is a vibrant collection of photography and painting that explores neighborhoods through layered compositions of architecture and design affected by time. This work celebrates urban culture as much as it documents history.
About Michael Crossett
I grew up in a military family with life always in motion. Living abroad gave me a fascination with different cultures, economic development and time. As a mixed media artist, I see myself as an architect making new structures and compositions with elements of the past, familiar places and everyday life marked with the passage of time and the force of change. Whether on public or private view, my work protects the history of yesterday and today and questions are we ready for the change that will occur tomorrow.
My recent work has focused on urban neighborhoods. As gentrification continues to transform cities, I am drawn to the contrast of historic and contemporary architecture and design, commercialism, and the energy that surrounds me. In a way, I am my own architect by creating new structures which juxtapose photography and found images with relevant and most often commercial symbols and icons. They shouldn’t always go together but do.
Michael Crossett
mcrossett@me.com
www.districtcreative.com
About Charlie Gaynor
I’ve always been visual. As a child in Kansas, I was called “artistic.” Art classes led the way to photography when I was given my grandfather’s Kodak Signet 50 (which I still have). After a BA in Commercial Art from the University of Kansas, fate led me to using a Leica as General Creighton Abrams’ personal photographer in Vietnam. After 9/11, I left film cameras for digital, as the electronic files were not as susceptible to airport x-rays. I have never looked back.
As a visual, I see color, the play of light and the juxtaposition of things around me; everything is a design. In my head, I’m a painter… I just use a camera for a brush. Whether it is my own neighborhood, a city elsewhere in the world or a stroll in the country, I stop when I see design. I study it, figure out how to make all the shapes and colors work and then in a fraction of a second, I freeze it into a rectangular format. Usually it can never be recreated again.
Charlie Gaynor