I visited the Barbara Van Cleve exhibition at the Yellowstone Art Museum yesterday afternoon. It was quiet and I was the only one in the gallery with over 40 of her works, all black and white, and, with the exception of four silver gelatin prints, all were archival pigment prints. The sizes varies but I believe all were at least 20x32 inches. They were all matted on white with very simple black frames. The images depict ranch life and most were taken at her family's ranch at the foot of the Crazy Mountains in Montana between the 1980s and early-2000s. Most were neutral in tone but several had a sepia or selenium quality to them.
While I have lived in Montana for over 3 decades and Cleeve's Lazy K Bar ranch is only 100 miles west of me, the whole cowboy/ranch/rodeo life is something that is not part of my realm so I don't have an emotional reaction or attachment to the narratives embedded in these images. In a way, it allows me to experience them in a detached way and to let them teach me something about a way of life I am relatively unfamiliar with as well as just let the composition, lighting, and subject matter speak for themselves.
The photos alternated between still imagery and those depicting action. There were plenty of quiet scenes showing strings of cattle roaming the prairies with the Crazy Mountains providing a backdrop and other showing horses in pastures under the clouds of the Big Sky. In several of these the lighting falling on the animals was exquisite, almost pulling them off the print into the gallery space itself. A series of other still images showed the people of these life, a saddle maker at work, a woman cooking over an old stove, a mounted cowboy with full equipment for the job at hand, and a straight on portrait of a young woman.
The action scenes take the viewer right into the business of this lifestyle showing the branding, roping, and herding the the animals. The one image that sticks in my mind is "Ghost Horses." The viewer is in the middle of a scene of horses running toward the image frame, dust kicked up all around, diffusing the light, creating a surreal look to the scene, softening the possibility of being trampled by the onslaught. This use of particulates, in this case dust, to enhance the lighting is evident in many images, sometimes using the dust of the trail and other times with falling snow. It is the lighting that the photographer has harnessed in an expert way to increase the impact of all these images.
On June 1st, Barbara Van Cleve will be at the museum for an artist talk, something I don't want to miss.
