The Ordinary, plus Time, Equals the Extraordinary

The photographs of Nathan Cote are intriguing in style, process, and subject matter. Even when his lens captures the mundane, there is nothing prosaic about the end result, and it is the ordinary scene that seems to be one of Cote’s principal aesthetic interests.

Regarding process, Cote uses a multiple exposure technique that creates wormhole-like passages that connect in-flux photo realities. On one negative, for example, he works to capture a multiplex of light values, from the intensity of morning sunlight to afternoon permutations and evening settings, in which artificial light is also incorporated. This pastiche creates part of the mystique that is a hallmark of his work.

Symbolically, according to the artist, the natural passage of time gets layered onto one image, as opposed to the more synthetic layering when a computer process such as Photoshop is used. Time with a capital T is certainly the secondary subject of Cote’s aesthetic, and the artist’s philosophical enquiries into the nature of passing time and Time itself inform each work’s often cinematic and transmuted quality.
 
Consider “Field of Fire #2” for a moment:  High line poles, fields, and a road are identified through a haze of what appears to be mist or smoke.  An eerie greenish and wheat-colored tone fills part of the picture plane, obscuring the sun.  A sense of movement other than that of the misty substance can be perceived but remains unidentified.  This mysterious quality is the result of the aforementioned multiple exposure process, one that takes up to four or five hours and sometimes longer to complete.  In “Field of Fire 2” the ordinary task of burning a stubble field is part of the subject of this landscape work, but connotations of the human imprint over time—represented by cyclical transitions of light—permeate the photograph. 

In the work “M&H” the graphics of advertising take precedence. Interestingly, on the day of this photo shoot, unleaded regular—the text is proximately featured in the print—was $2.04 a gallon.  Artificial and natural light coalesce and collide as this ordinary scene takes on Cote’s signature layered-light quality, one that stuns with its beautiful strangeness. 

Mixing the known and unknown in the photo process by combining genre scenes with visually created vestiges of immortal Time is an extraordinary conceptual practice from an artist with the gift to add significantly to a heavily populated art field, that of the ubiquitous and too often commonplace photograph.

If You Go

WHAT: The Photographs of Nathan Cote
WHERE: Gallery 514, 514 Broadway
WHEN: Mon-Wed 11am-2pm; Thu 11am-3pm; Fri-Sat 10am-5pm
INFO: 297-5160