My photograph series “Static Movement: Doolin” won the semi-annual Northeastern Creates! competition. The prints are being reformatted and will be featured larger-than-life as 12 foot tall prints on the face of a Northeastern building on Huntington Avenue in Boston!
I was interviewed for an article at News@Northeastern, here’s an excerpt:
Works of art that showcase the talent in the university’s graphic arts community are on display in a big way. Giant-sized banners, created by student Alex Turnwall and lecturer Matthew Rich, have been hung in the windows of West Village H along Huntington Avenue and on the Centennial Common façade of Meserve Hall, respectively.
Turnwall, a senior graphic design and business major, and Rich, an Art + Design lecturer, won the most recent NU Creates semi-annual banner competition for students and faculty. President Joseph Aoun picked winning works.
Turnwall created a series of digitally manipulated photographs capturing the progression of three avid rock climbers as they scaled Ireland’s Doolin Mountains. He drew inspiration from artists such as photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who in the late 1800s used multiple cameras to famously capture the motion of a galloping horse and buffalo.
“I was trying to capture two things at once – the rock climber moving through time and his interaction with the environment,” said Turnwall. While studying at the Burren College of Art in Ballyvaughan, Ireland, as part of the global student program Dialogue of Civilizations, he took 100 photographs of each climber during his assent and then “overlaid the images that looked good together.”
The images, he explained, attempt to show the climbers’ obsessive passion for the sport and their unusual relationship with nature. In his proposal, Turnwall described climbing as a “masochistic ritual that becomes more rewarding the more you suffer. In few other situations,” he added, “is the participant so obsessively focused and dependent on such minute natural details.”