...AIR STAGNATION ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 1 PM MST
FRIDAY...
* WHAT...An extended period of stagnant air, with light winds
and little vertical mixing.
* WHERE...Portions of south central, southwest and west central
Idaho and northeast and southeast Oregon.
* WHEN...Until 1 PM MST Friday, and this time may be extended.
* IMPACTS...Periods of air stagnation can lead to the buildup of
pollutants near the surface.
* ADDITIONAL DETAILS...Winds will be strong enough today,
Wednesday, and Thursday afternoons in portions of the Upper
Treasure Valley and Western Magic Valley to limit stagnation.
However, parts of the zones will experience stagnant air and
were therefore included in this advisory.
PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...
An Air Stagnation Advisory concerns itself with meteorological
conditions only. For more information on air pollution in Idaho,
visit website www.deq.idaho.gov. For Oregon, visit website
www.oregon.gov/deq.
If possible, reduce or eliminate activities that contribute to
air pollution, such as outdoor burning, and the use of
residential wood burning devices. Reduce vehicle trips and
vehicle idling as much as possible.
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Top Left: Another “Chair Noir.”
Top Right: Aerial photograph, “the ice fairy (or parachute).”
In the early morning or at dusk, those liminal moments when day and night meet before one becomes the other, Sue Schaper can be seen walking her dog on the streets and along the back alleys of downtown Caldwell, stopping to look and taking snapshots with her cell phone camera. “Dog walking is a good cover …” for stopping and looking, she tells me. These times of day are the perfect “… moments of dark lucidity,” a phrase I cropped from the elegant artist’s statement accompanying her exhibition, “Disappearances.” Sue Schaper’s photographs are on view at the Rosenthal Gallery of Art at Blatchley Hall on the campus of The College of Idaho now until Jan. 27, 2023.
“I could see things before I could read,” Schaper told me while walking through her exhibition. With nothing to do but look as she rode the school bus for an hour each way from her northern Iowa farm, she became “visually attentive to patterns and shadows and … subtlety in landscape of seeming sameness.”
Sometimes called “having an eye,” Schaper’s attentiveness to what she sees is on full display in this exhibit of several dozen black and white photographs, each of them jewels.
One grouping in “Disappearances,” is photographs of chairs. Schaper calls them “ghosts.”’ One solitary tattered upholstered armchair abandoned near a warehouse wall the artist calls “The Grand Inquisitor.” She describes several of these photographs as “Chair Noir:” one lone plastic chair, a grouping in the alley behind a business, and a row of broken-down theater seats left behind, seeming to wait for something to happen. To her, there is an intimacy in chairs, witnesses to the vagaries of human life, seeming almost human themselves. The eloquence of absence whispers from these images.
Moving around the gallery is also a move through the seasons, going from the chair photographs taken mainly in spring and summer to a stunning series of winter ice photographs. In 2021, a dramatic weather event occurred in the northern Midwest when the temperature dropped from around 70 to below freezing in a matter of hours. Lakes and ponds abruptly froze solid with unusual patterns of trapped air. She conceived the idea of shooting aerials, holding the camera parallel to the ground to see what images she might capture.
I particularly loved this series of photographs. They are mysterious, beautiful, and disorienting. You might be looking at a vast landscape from a plane, or inches above a tiny puddle of ice in a sidewalk crack. You might be looking though a microscope. Is it geology or micro-biology? In one image there might have been a crack in the ice, a slight melt, and then a dramatic refreezing that causes the fuzziness. In another, a tiny universe of specks might be the Milky Way.
Earlier, I described Sue Schaper’s process as taking snapshots. That does not do them justice. She has clearly seen the potential of the image with her eyes, then has framed and snapped the image. It is a quick process, no staging or set up, no special lighting, no practice shots, leaving it to the camera. Very little editing is involved, mainly cropping. She explained that she uses autofocus because she has some vision problems, and when she hears the whirring lens moving in and out trying to find the focus, she feels connected to the camera, as if they are both trying to figure out what they are seeing.
The combination of risk-taking and trust in the camera as a collaborator is on full display on a third section of photographs. In these she has covered the camera with a loose sandwich baggie, and pointing at the sun, has made a series of what she calls “botanicals.” Sue Schaper has upended the tradition of a botanical intended to document a plant. Because the baggie stretches and unfolds, she has no idea when the blurring will occur in the image of a flower or a blade of grass. “They are extremely ephemeral,” she says. This body of work was inspired by Alison McCauley’s photobook “Anywhere but Here,” a collection of photographs taken through distressed glass.
The final part of the exhibit shows a few works based on a new concept Sue Schaper is starting to explore. This new imagery is shot in the times of day when there is a balance between artificial light and natural light, mostly taken at dusk or dawn. In one beautifully composed photograph, the empty streets are reflected in the bar window, the inside stools still up on chairs. A perfect moment of presence and absence, of dark lucidity.
Those who know Sue Schaper may be surprised to learn that she is an accomplished photographer. At the College of Idaho, she is a Professor of English, specializing in Victorian Literature. With Garth Classen, artist and art historian, she teaches a course about London, and they take students to London for a winter term. They have become good friends as well as colleagues, and both spent the last academic year pursuing sabbatical projects. The scholarly literary part of her project dealt with Victorian women writers who observed the urban spaces of London. She decided that it would be interesting to combine her own practices of observation with her academic research.
Garth Classen, who is also the Director of the Rosenthal Gallery, became very interested in the photography project that paralleled her sabbatical work, and proposed this exhibit. A grant from the Alexa Rose Foundation underwrote the costs of matting, framing, and installing the exhibit. That foundation is impacting the lives of artists in very positive ways. This exhibit is a wonderful example!
“Disappearances” is on view in the Rosenthal Gallery at Blatchley Hall on the campus of The College of Idaho and is open now until Jan. 27, 2023. The gallery is open Monday — Friday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Although there is a holiday closure from Dec. 16 — Jan. 9, arrangements can be made to visit the exhibit during this period by contacting GClaassen@college of idaho.edu.).
Driek Zirinsky, Ph. D, is Emeritus Professor of English of Boise State University and a collector of contemporary art. She is learning how to be an art writer.
