RICHMOND, Ind. – Richmond resident Mark Pearson is exhibiting photography in the MacDowell Gallery at Reid Health, 1100 Reid Parkway in Richmond, Indiana.
The gallery is named after former CEO Barry MacDowell and is located on the second floor near the main hospital entrance. The show, titled “Seeing the ‘Extra’ in the Ordinary,” features landscapes, nature shots and glimpses of the industrial past, as well as scenes from recent travels to Greece. The exhibit will be on display through mid-March.
Many of the 29 works in the show are black and white images.
“I try to see the ‘extra’ in an ordinary scene and plumb its essence; monochrome seems ideally suited to the stripping away of superfluous detail and the enhancing of imaginative possibilities,” Pearson said. “For example, one can almost physically sense the snowstorm’s frigid enveloping of the horses in ‘Equine Trinity’ and the stark bleakness of bitter cold in ‘Snow Zen.’ Nature shots can also be enhanced in black and white. The heavy cumulus with their dark gray underbellies of ‘Gated Hedgerow’ add a poignancy to the scene while the scudding cirrus of ‘Westonbirt Arboretum’ seem to shout “Constable!” to the viewer and the westerly wind-blown clouds of ‘Big Sky Indiana’ illustrate the under-appreciated scenic nature of our local countryside.”
Other pieces in the show highlight the nature of industrial architecture with eye-catching compositions of bridges, buildings and machinery used in agriculture and industry. A series of images from the Greek peninsula of Mount Athos includes monastic buildings of a unique nature, and the triptych ‘Awaiting the Resurrection’ is an experiment exploring the nature of death and resurrection in a monastic context.
Pearson immigrated to the United States nearly 30 years ago from the United Kingdom with his wife, Erica (a native of Ann Arbor, Michigan), and 2-year-old daughter, Megan, to take a position in the Computing Center at Earlham College where he worked as an instructional technologist. He retired in 2016 in order to devote more time to photography.
Unlike his daughter or son, Pearson has retained his British accent, which gets stronger every time he goes on an almost annual visit to the U.K. Notwithstanding these visits, he feels very much at home in Hoosier-land, and despite repeated queries from British relatives about returning there, his roots are firmly established in Indiana though he attends an Orthodox Christian church in Beavercreek, Ohio.
Following through on his assertions of loyalty to the Stars and Stripes, he successfully wended his way through US Citizenship & Immigration Services bureaucracy last year to obtain citizenship in the United States and a U.S. Passport.
