KEEPIN’ IT REAL. Poet Robert Geller and photographer Mark Plampin combined their talents to create a series of 12 artworks that provide a study in contrasting realism as it pertains to everyday life. In “Cover Up” for example (shown here), decaying rust and peeling paint are caught on film and presented as metaphors for false pretenses people often assume that, in this case, are “peeled back” through the power of poetic verse to expose the tender vulnerability of what it is to be human. The exhibit can also be seen online at www.pacificcolorgalleries.com/markplampinphotography.htm. (Photo of artwork by sean dean)
Two artistic mediums come together in the works of poet Robert Geller and photographer Mark Plampin now on view at One Heart Cafe in downtown Tacoma. Exploring the juxtaposition between what the eye sees and what’s really going on beneath the surface, things are not quite what they seem in this collection of 12 images.
Each artist brought to the table his own talents in creating these works. Geller had a collection of poems he had already written, and he was interested in putting a book together with images provided by someone else. To find that someone, he posted an ad for a photographer on Craigslist about a year ago. That’s how he met Plampin and the two hit it off from the start.
Once they came together, ideas began bubbling up as Plampin developed a sense of what Geller had in mind. Plampin already had some images in his collection that would work; others he went out and shot just for this exhibit. With camera in hand, Plampin set out to forage for images in downtown Tacoma.
“It was like a photo assignment,” Plampin said. A professional photographer, Plampin has been a photographer since high school and a freelancer for several years specializing in wedding photography, portraiture and commercial shoots. He said the opportunity to collaborate with a writer on this creative endeavor was a welcome change of pace.
Geller wanted shots of industrial Tacoma, raw images rough around the edges. Ropes, chains, rust, peeling paint - things that normally wouldn’t earn a second glance and that had a hardness to them, an unadorned realism. Combined with Geller’s carefully crafted poems, which represent a more polished form of art, Plampin’s photography proved to be the perfect lynchpin to create a study in contrasts.
In “Beyond,” for example, Plampin photographed a decaying cemetery statue, weathered and covered in moss and lichens. Viewing this while contemplating Geller’s accompanying poem brings to mind that final hour of life when we prepare to face our maker alone, wearing nothing but our human faults and flaws like the moss that gathered on the statue - the real person is exposed with no designer labels or snazzy haircuts to pretty up what’s really inside one’s heart. “When the end is up/ Will we exit with grace?/ Will we know on the threshold/ What we are about to face?” The statue of concrete works as a metaphor for everlasting life.
“The Doll House” shows two porcelain figurines all dressed up in finery, the perfect couple sipping tea, looking proper, white and clean. But something lurks underneath; the façade of money and success is in reality an illusion. “The boy stands smiling, full of rage/ straining the face to conceal his pain. /Kenny and Barbie come out to play, /Primping and prancing/ Yet with nothing to say.”
This is Geller’s first time to show his work publicly, and he said he finds it at once frightening and exhilarating. Rather than creating art that would be commercially acceptable, Geller chose instead to invest in his own self-expression for this exhibit. “It was the artistic expression I was after,” Geller said of the final product that now hangs on the walls of One Heart Cafe.
The cafe is located at 604 Fawcett Ave., between the Grand Cinema and Two Vaults Gallery.
