Artists Jason Bennett, Tom Leighton and Nick Veasey use hundreds of photographs to make one print.
For Veasey’s Mini Cooper piece, he combined 152 x-ray images. Leighton used 200 images to compose his fabricated city, made up of eight different locations across the globe. Bennett takes 300 to 350 photos and a unique 4D process to bring the botanical world to life.
“It has a sculpture effect. It looks like it’s coming off the wall,” Evan Lurie, owner of Evan Lurie Fine Art Gallery, said.
The work of all three artists will be unveiled at Lurie’s gallery at 30 W. Main St. in Carmel during the IU Health North Second Saturday Gallery Walk. The collection will be of particular interest to art lovers as a limited number of pieces is available.
“All three do very small editions of their work. Each only did five in each collection and two artist proofs,” Lurie said.
Lurie said Bennett, Leighton and Veasey were recently featured at the Art Basel Miami show in December. Art Basel presents premier artwork from across the globe with more than 250 of the world’s leading galleries participating and 50,000 international visitors.
“These guys are three leading innovators in manipulated, cutting-edge photography in the world today,” he said. “My goal for the gallery is to be thought of as a fine art gallery and a learning facility. A place where people can see what’s going on in the world of fine art and on the cutting edge.”
The IU Health North Second Saturday Gallery Walk will be highlighting local and national to international art works from 5 to 10 p.m. Saturday in the Carmel Arts & Design District. Stop by the ArtSplash Gallery at 111 W. Main St. to pick up a scavenger hunt list and start looking for fantastic pieces of art in each gallery. When finished, head back to ArtSplash to claim a prize and to be entered in a drawing for a great prize from district merchants. Matt Ruddick also will be playing live in the district.
“We encourage people to bring kids. We want children to be exposed to art – it broadens the minds of our young people,” Lurie said.
Galleries involved include ArtSplash, Coats Wright Art & Design, Evan Lurie Gallery, Eye on Art Gallery, French Bleu Gallery, Magdalena Gallery of Art, Mary Johnston Studio, Soori Gallery and Trilridge Fine Art.
“We’re here to help people understand art,” Lurie said. “It’s a nice cultural experience and a great date night – go out and be involved in things educational and engaging. Do something you don’t get to do every day or see every day.”
For the monthly walks, all galleries try to feature at least one artist at the event.
“We help encourage people to get educated in art and discover what you like,” he said. “Art is a reflection of our society and cultural identity… Embrace your own taste, identity. Art is a reflection of our own inner soul.”
If you come across a particular piece, Lurie said artwork in all galleries is for sale.
“Art doesn’t have to be expensive to be good,” he said.
For more information, visit www.carmelartsanddesign.com.
Artist Bios
Jason Bennett
Bennett has always pursued photography as a process – one that deals inherently with the nature of time. To invent this work, he started with several hundred images, precisely collected during a period of days and relative distance. The fourth dimension, time is created through the combination of the depth and time axis. And thus left to right becomes past and future. The ability to trick the mind so completely is a window into perception and the interconnectedness of our senses.
Nick Veasey
Veasey worked in the advertising and design industries and pursued work in conventional still photography before making the serendipitous discovery of applying X-ray imaging to everyday objects and skeletons after being asked to X-ray a cola can for a television show. Veasey also X-rayed the shoes he was wearing on the day and upon showing the finished image to an art director, was galvanized by the response it provoked.
Tom Leighton
Leighton’s new works reveal the poetic beauty that can result from painstaking digital manipulation. He has travelled through Europe, Asia and North America, building an impressive body of photographic images that he then combines to make fantastical landscapes. Leighton’s images abound with groups of buildings, people, objects – like in Golden Gate or Paris 1.
