UNDER THESE STONES: Vanishing Reflections of Rural North Carolina
by Mikel Robinson
November 21, 2008 – January 2009
http://underthesestones.homestead.com

UNDER THESE STONES is a series of large, square photographs that document North Carolina's disappearing rural landscape. Robinson purposefully employs a square format, unusual in traditional landscape photography, to emulate "looking through a small window at the historic land I love being quickly boxed in." Mounted on panels, the digitally printed images are overworked by hand with various mixed media, including North Carolinian elements such as red clay, mica, gray riverbank clay, and beeswax.

A few years ago while traveling around the South, Robinson was struck by the dichotomy between areas that appeared lost in time, seemingly unchanged for centuries, and the ubiquitous developed swathes of land that were nothing like the rural South he knew as a child. As he explains, "the mystique of Southern identity has long been tied to the land. The South is a place where history and myth collide; much of it unchanged since before the time of the Civil War... [M]odernization is quickly erasing the history of [our] land, and I fear much of it is disappearing before it can be documented." Robinson's compulsion to photograph what remains of the land he loves is ongoing. The portfolio of work presented in UNDER THESE STONES wonderfully blurs the lines between our universal nostalgia for the days before strip malls, the artist's personal connection to and passion for the untouched landscape, and the rich rural history of North Carolina.

Raised in Catawba County, Robinson currently resides in Durham. His roots in rural North Carolina go back nearly ten generations. Robinson's ancestors were poor Scotch/Irish farmers who settled in the North Carolina mountains during the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

THROUGH THIS LENS IS PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE OUR NEW COLLECTORS’ GALLERY
We moved a wall and our framing counter to create a cozy alcove in which to display rotating selections of prints from our vast inventory of original, signed photographs. Until now hundreds of images have been in sleepy hibernation inside identical archival print storage boxes. These prints are eager to wake up, show themselves and make your acquaintance.

As a special kick off of the Collectors’ Gallery, we will feature the work of two excellent photographers in whose hands the old is new again (or is it the other way around?). On display from November 21, 2008, are contemporary daguerreotypes by Jonathan Danforth http://jonathandanforth.com and a collection of alumitypes and ambrotypes by Emma Powell.