A new exhibit at the Brigham Young University Museum of Art will feature the photographic dreamscapes of Rodney Smith beginning Thursday, July 28, through Monday, Jan. 16, 2006.
The event is open to the public and is free.
Smith’s work, “Adam’s Dream: The Photographs of Rodney Smith,” will be on view in the Conway A. Ashton and Carl E. Jackman Gallery on the museum’s second floor.
The exhibit consists of 69 black-and-white gelatin silver prints drawn from all phases of Smith’s career with a particular emphasis on his commercial work during the 1990s.
“A camera’s eye,” Smith says, “can see the world with more acuity or resolve than your own eye. It can penetrate deeper, it can see sharper, it can give you an insight and a depth that your own eye can’t have.”
The title of the exhibition is drawn from a passage in an 1817 letter written by the poet John Keats: “The imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream. He awoke and found it truth.”
In poetically interpreting “Adam” as “everyman,” both Keats and Smith ponder the experience of the imagination and dreams and their connection to the immediacy of the human world. Smith’s photographs seek after the insight that dreams provide into the experience of reality.
“My interest is not in what is new or fashionable, but rather what endures and is graceful, stylish and beautiful,” Smith says.
For more information on this and other Museum of Art events, contact Christopher Wilson at (801)422-8251.
