Expecting to Fly

There you stood, on the edge of your feather / Expecting to fly. – Neil Young

In a life lived in a swirl of known and unknown, where we merge our dreams of love and death with the changing light, three photographers take us on journeys that both tie us to the land and tug earnestly at our imaginations.

Burgeoning stories inherent in the tiniest quail egg by Kate Breakey; a white deer in a Keith Carter forest; or a bridge standing like a half-forgotten memory by Susan Burnstine; all acknowledge our mortal ties to this earth, but also remind us: if we let our latent wings emerge, we can still expect to fly.

Press Release: Etherton Gallery is pleased to present Expecting to Fly, an exhibition highlighting recent work by photographers Kate Breakey, Keith Carter and Susan Burnstine. On display in the gallery pop-up is work by Finnish photographer Pentti Sammallahti. The exhibition opens with an artist reception at the gallery, 7-10pm, Saturday November 23, 2019 and runs through January 11, 2019.

Beloved Tucson artist Kate Breakey continues her exploration of the taxonomy of the natural world - in particular her lifetime fascination with birds, presenting three new series grouped under the title Ornithology. Expecting to Fly introduces Nests, hand-colored and hand-stitched photographs of intricate little birds’ nests printed on silk; Collection, pigment prints of birds made in the tradition of early scientific pen and ink drawings from 18th and 19th century natural history encyclopedias; and Quail Eggs, hand-colored still lives of tiny quail eggs in unique frames.

Hailed as “poet of the ordinary” by the Los Angeles Times, Texas native Keith Carter celebrates a long and accomplished career in Expecting to Fly with an exhibition of iconic and recent work and a new book, Keith Carter: Fifty Years (University Texas Press, 2019). His photographs celebrate the familiar and the magical in images that capture ordinary moments of every day life. Carter humbly calls these moments “small epiphanies” but in his hands moments of small town Texas life are transformed into something transcendent.

For the past fourteen years LA based photographer Susan Burnstine has examined variations on the transitory moments between dreaming and waking, which reveal fleeting traces of what once was. To do this she creates medium format film cameras primarily made out of plastic, vintage camera parts and random household objects, with single-element lenses molded from hobby plastic and rubber. The resulting images comprise the series, Where Shadows Cross, and capture the unique quality of her visions.

Finnish photographer Pentti Sammallahti travels the world making joyful, moving photographs of animals in the landscape. He shares with Breakey and Carter a sense of the poetry of ordinary life. In 2003 Henri Cartier-Bresson chose a photo by Sammallahti for his foundation’s inaugural exhibition in Paris. In Solovki, White Sea, Russia, 1992 a big dog sits atop a Russian snowmobile king of all it surveys.

For more information about the Kate Breakey, Susan Burnstine, Keith Carter or Expecting to Fly, contact Daphne Srinivasan or Hannah Glasston.