Ray Charles White
Recent Work

Senior & Shopmaker Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new photographic works by photographer Ray Charles White.  The artist, born in Toronto in 1961, employs “straight photography” skills which he honed under the tutelage of Ansel Adams, in combination with computer-based digital technology and screenprinting techniques.  The resulting images—water surfaces, tree branches, shards of cracked ice—are silkscreened onto anodized aluminum panels producing an effect at once simple and infinitely detailed.

Shooting directly from nature, White captures the tension, tranquility, and emotional potential of water, in all its forms. Like artists such as Vija Celmins, Roni Horn, and Hiroshi Sugimoto, White is fascinated by the potential for pure abstraction inherent in patterns found in water surfaces. By tightly cropping his images and arranging them in minimalist grids, the artist eliminates references to specific landscapes. The reflectivity afforded by their aluminum substrate animates his subjects and further separates them from the static nature of traditional landscape photography. In his essay, Enigma of the Earth, Vincent Katz describes the tension in White’s work between nature and technology: “… there is a deeper look, to the materials and means of transference, and the mechanical nature of what we are looking at takes precedence. White takes a salutary distance from Warhol’s undeniable influence, taking a more cautious approach, toeing a line between nature and technology.”

White has exhibited throughout the United States and Canada in solo and group exhibitions, and most recently at Albemarle Gallery in London. His work is included in the collections of the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL; the Musee d’art Contemporain, Lausanne, Switzerland, the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa, Canada, and the Progressive Collection, Cleveland, OH..

Gallery hours are Tuesday-Friday, 10am-6pm, and Saturday, 11am-6pm. For further information, contact Betsy Senior or Laurence Shopmaker.