Celebrate Art!
 SIERRA ART TRAILS 2018
 Yosemite Foothills Open Studio Tour
 
Friday, October 5th through Sunday, October 7th
The upcoming 2018 Sierra Art Trails open studio tour has many talented artists.  The Sierra Sun Times will be featuring a sampling 

of several area artists each week leading up to the show.  Check back regularly to see who the next featured artist will be.


Wendy Denton
Artist #74

Wendy DentonArtist Statement: Interpreting Yosemite through a film-based toy camera is a different experience than contemporary digital images. You can’t count on carefully crafted image-making and always experience an element of surprise as the toy camera takes over. In Urgent 2nd Class, author and artist Nick Bantock says: “There is something too complete about most photos… They need a dose of controlled eccentricity that will alter and personalize them…” The Holga’s vignette edges and unexpected light diffusion lend qualities of both mystery and eccentricity to my images of Yosemite.

I will be showing these images at Gertrude School, built 11 years before Yosemite was designated a national park. The Gertrude Schoolhouse is located at 41772 Road 600 in Ahwahnee, CA.

Sierra Art Trails Artist’s Bio: I learned photography in Germany in my early 20s. At first I was self-taught through books and a makeshift darkroom in my kitchen. I then used the darkroom in the Karlsruhe U.S. Army base. My love was black and white imagery, and my photographic activity was more or less my therapy.

When I moved back to the States and ended up in San Jose, I attended De Anza College. Their photo department was then nationally known, and I am grateful for the quality instruction I received there – as well as the fellow students who were as alternative as I was and supported my less than mainstream interests. I then worked at Custom Color Lab in Palo Alto as a master color printer, where I met other artists who were both wackier and more skilled.

Over the last 30+ years I have often used the camera as my conduit with the world, my way of connecting while remaining separate. My images have usually had intensely personal meaning, except for one rather bizarre departure into wedding photography that didn’t last long.

Today I am interested in the marginalized. My birds are often objects of discomfort for some because they are dead, and I found them along the side of roads. For me, photographing them is my tribute, my altar, to their presence in our lives. My Holga images (toy, plastic camera) are of ruins, places that once held meaning for someone and now are collapsing under the weight of time. My image transfers are also of abandoned places, though these often have the feeling that someone just walked out one day and never came back. My Cancer Chronicles series documents the 18-month journey from my husband’s diagnosis of pancreatic cancer to his death. I am currently working on a new series entitled The Seven Deadly Sins of Climate Change.

The title of my Sierra Art Trails 2016 exhibit is Yosemite through a Plastic Toy Camera and I have returned to the Holga plastic toy camera for this collection of images. In Urgent 2nd Class, author and artist Nick Bantock says: “There is something too complete about most photos…They need a dose of controlled eccentricity that will alter and personalize them…” The Holga’s vignette edges and unexpected light diffusion lend qualities of both mystery and eccentricity to my images of Yosemite.


WENDY DENTON
Phone: (408) 655-0758
Email: wendydenton@sti.net
Website: WendyDenton.net

Wendy Denton Glacier Point Half DomeGlacier Point Half Dome in Yosemite National Park
Wendy Denton Tunnel View Tunnel View in Yosemite National Park
Wendy Denton Glacier Point Tree Outlook Glacier Point Tree Outlook in Yosemite National Park
Wendy Denton Glacier Point Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park

Wendy Denton Rock ArchRock Arch in Yosemite National Park

To learn more about Sierra Art Trails visit link below.
SAT sm

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