April 3 - June 24, Palace Avenue is pleased to present upcoming artist Kevin Beltran opening Unobservable Noise at Iconik Coffee Roasters Lena. Opening reception Friday, April 14 from 4 - 6 PM at 1610 Lena Street, Santa Fe, NM 87505.
Palace Avenue is delighted to announce the upcoming exhibition of Kevin Beltran's Unobservable Noise at Iconik Coffee Roasters Lena. The exhibition will be on view from April 3 through June 24, 2023.
Kevin Beltran is a photography artist whose works deal with the concept of noise and its role in shaping our perception of the world around us. Beltran's pieces are an attempt to capture the unobservable noise that exists in the background of our daily lives, the constant hum that we have learned to tune out.
The opening reception for Unobservable Noise will take place on Friday, April 14, 2023, from 4 PM to 6 PM at Iconik Coffee Roasters Lena, located at 1610 Lena Street, Santa Fe, NM 87505. The event is free and open to the public, and attendees will have the opportunity to meet the artist and experience his work firsthand.
Palace Avenue invites art lovers and coffee enthusiasts alike to join us for this exciting exhibition of Kevin Beltran's Unobservable Noise. Don't miss this chance to explore the unseen world of noise that surrounds us every day.
“Unobservable Noise”
A homage to the late false-color infrared film also known as Kodak Areochrome. Created during WWII by the U.S. military to detect military bases and artillery that were covered by camouflage and living vegetation, it later on made its way to other areas such as vegetation and forestry surveys, hydrology, and earth resources monitoring. The film was created to reflect infrared light which shows up in plants by capturing an invisible spectrum of light that creates reds, pinks, crimsons and light purples.
The film stock became accessible to the public during the 1960’s, and during its span of production photographers and artists found ways to utilize its unique characteristics, including for album covers, graphic design departments and documentary pieces. Kodak Areochrome was discontinued in 2009 but has now seen a resurgence in the film community, and like most film emulsions has also become prohibitively expensive.
“Unobservable Noise” was inspired by a project called “The Enclave” by Richard Mosse - Mosse’s project was focused around large-scale photographs and short documentary shot 16mm film of people and landscapes in the Congo that fell victim to two decades of civil war. This humanitarian disaster was widely overlooked by mass media at the time, and Mosse’s use of this particular film stock was an attempt to cast this heavily undocumented crisis in a new light that caught viewers eyes in order to make the disaster visible.
My homage to this one of a kind film stock is through a digital approach, with editing software. The intention is to bring light to the unseen, and to interrogate our relationship with the land, a goal filled with tension given that this film stock was initially used as a tool of colonial warfare, damage and destruction.
Climate change, natural resources extraction and natural disasters continue to alter our lands and change our perceptions of the vegetation that once was abundant throughout the Southwest. We continue to wage warfare on the land, and jeopardize the survival of future generations, who will bear witness to all the damage we leave behind. We too often take for granted the green that we see, and overlook the receding vegetation until it's all gone. By using the red coloring to highlight the overlooked aspects of the land, this series asks us to closely observe the precious things around us that we may take for granted in our day to day.
How can we alter our way of thinking without having to alter an image in order to pay more attention or draw us into a scene? How can we hold ourselves accountable to the unspoken truth before us?