"Take me to the river": Vernissage and exhibition by Michael Kolster

Join the Fine Arts Gallery and the AUP community for an exhibition titled "Take Me to the River" by artist Michael Kolster. The vernissage will take place on Wednesday March 15 and the exhibition lasts through April 8.

About the artist

Michael Kolster is a 2013 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in Photography and an associate professor of art at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where he lives with his family.  His work resides in a number of private collections, including George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, Capital One Financial Corporation, and the Polaroid Corporation. He has a BA in American Studies from Williams College and MFA in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston.

In Take Me to the River, Michael Kolster explores the Androscoggin, Schuylkill, James, and Savannah Rivers as they emerge from two centuries of industrial use and neglect. Even as these rivers still carry the legacies of longstanding pollution in their currents and sediments, in the years following the Clean Water Act of 1972, they have become renewed and rediscovered to an extent our grandparents never could have envisioned. 

Kolster’s photographs are ambrotypes, unique glass plate positives, produced with the wet-plate photographic process in a portable darkroom Kolster set up along the banks and overlooks of these rivers. The chemical slurries that develop and fix the image on the glass plate mimic the movements of a river’s current, and the idiosyncratic qualities of Kolster’s ambrotypes harken back to the historical coincidence of the dawn of photography and the industrialization of Europe and America. 

With the reality of a changing global climate and consensus building about the extent that humans are responsible, Take Me to the River challenges us to set aside our blinders of wanting to see these riverine landscapes as either pure or despoiled. As the boundaries between the human and the natural are increasingly entangled, Kolster’s photographs suggest how we can reconsider places once degraded and ignored as touchstones for a new way to see the places we live in.