Press Releases and Exhibit Information
4/08/11
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT:
Robert Lundahl Photographer | Film Maker
robert@studio-rla.com
P.O. Box 429, Solana Beach, CA 92075
415.205.3481
The “Harmonious Balance” show of fine art photography opens at Encinitas’ E Street Cafe Wednesday, April 13, 7-10 pm.
Photographer, Film Maker, and Encinitas resident, Robert Lundahl’s fine art photographs invoke feelings of connection and compassion in light of Japan’s recent earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disasters.
“In an increasingly interconnected world we are all one. Never has this is been more evident as we share an ocean, an atmosphere, food and fisheries, thoughts and prayers, with those most directly affected by recent nuclear reactor meltdowns in Japan,” Lundahl says. I was walking along Coast Highway to clear my head after reading increasingly horrifying reports about radioactive releases into the ocean, and I looked out to sea realizing we’re closer than we think.”
The exhibit features 5 hanging Japanese style scrolls, each comprised of images, balanced one on top of the other. On the top are pictures from popular media, adapted and stylized showing tsunami damage, fires, reactor smoke, and other iconography that people all around the world have now become familiar with. What makes the large photographs particularly unique is the imagery in the bottom frame which has been photographed on the beach near the Swami’s surfing break in Encinitas, just down the street from the venue at the E Street Cafe.
Lundahl says, “I was walking on the beach one day and to my surprise found hundreds of rocks balanced atop the rip-rap protecting the sandstone cliffs. It was a stunning and beautiful scene witnessing these colorful stones delicately placed atop one another, balanced, suspended in time. They looked like the Easter Island (Rapa Nui) heads, called Moai, but in miniature–faceless, looking out to sea.
In addition to the 5 large hanging scrolls, are 8 panels of super-imposed images that combine balanced stones with other scenes, such as control operators in the Fukushima nuclear power plant, Japanese news graphics, and families on the beach. “Bean Head Buddha,” is a remarkable super-imposure incorporating a statuesque Buddha with organically grown beans from the Cedros Avenue Farmers Market. The image of peace, serenity and balance of the internal kind, connects with heathy food.
“The air we breathe, the ocean we swim and surf in, the food we eat, the water we drink, and the connections we feel with one another, are the most precious of gifts and the things we can never allow to be compromised,” Lundahl says. The scrolls and photographs incorporate inscriptions from the Heart Sutra, one of the principal tenets of Buddhism. In fact the very word Sutra, itself, is from the Sanskrit language and means tied or knitted together.
The show will be up through April.
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11/15/07
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
PRESS CONTACTS:
Mark Chamberlain
BC Space
235 Forest Ave.
Laguna Beach, CA (Downtown)
949.497.1880
bcspace@mol.net
www.bcspace.com
Robert Lundahl
Photographer/Filmmaker
415.205.3481
robert@studio-rla.com
www.unconquering.org
MAJOR ENVIRONMENTAL FILM TO SCREEN AT LAGUNA’S BC SPACE, SUNDAY, 12/02/07, at 2:00 p.m. A round table discussion follows until 5:00 p.m. The filmmaker will be present.
Laguna Beach, CA, and Port Angeles, WA, Nov. 15, 2007― BC SPACE announces the screening of the feature-length documentary Unconquering the Last Frontier, the first film to address the topic of dam removal and ecosystem restoration on Washington State’s Elwha River. Filmmaker Robert Lundahl made the film over a period of eight years. Admission is free.
The screening will be held in support of Southern California creeks, rivers and riparian ecosystems, including San Mateo Creek (Trestles), Aliso Creek, and Matilija Creek (at the Ventura River) among others, along with habitat preservation efforts located on the land previously occupied by the former El Toro Marine Base in Orange County and now subject to development by Lennar Corporation. Community and environmental leaders, indigenous representatives and healers, activists, and the public are invited to attend.
Unconquering the Last Frontier describes how the Lower Elwha Dam was constructed illegally in 1908, how dam management practices contributed to the river’s decline, and how events on the river were paralleled by the systematic political, economic, and cultural suppression of the native people. The story is told through the eyes of Lower Elwha Klallam tribe elders, Beatrice Charles and Adeline Smith, along with tribal members, Rachel Kowalski-Hagaman, Joe Luce, and former Tribal Chairman, Russ Hepfer. Acclaimed Native American actor Gary Farmer narrated the film. Bay Area composer Tony Saunders created its score.
In 1976, the tribe, along with 14 environmental groups, intervened in the FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) process to stop the relicensing of one of the river’s two dams. The tribe wanted the dams removed and the Elwha River watershed ecosystem restored. Such restoration was mandated by Congress in 1992 and is slowly moving forward. In February 2000, the federal government purchased the dams, the first step toward their physical removal, now anticipated to begin in 2012.
“Unconquering the Last Frontier” tells of the aggressive industrial development of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula at the expense of the native people, who had lived along the river since time immemorial,” says Lundahl. “The triumvirate of hydropower, mills and logging stripped the Olympic Peninsula of its magnificent forests and its legendary salmon. The corporations left the native people, as well the descendants of the area’s European-American settlers, often without jobs and without hope.
“The film tells of the Klallam Nation’s struggle to recover their culture and traditional livelihoods in the shadow of hydropower development. At the same time, the story can be seen as a cautionary tale, as the companies that once developed and dominated the Pacific Northwest have since moved on to Pennsylvania, to the American South, to Canada, Alaska, Malaysia, Thailand, South America and Russia, and now China and other locations, where they’ve continued their same practices at the expense of the global environment and of indigenous peoples of those regions. The film also calls into question an Americanized notion of “Progress,” which assumes that ecosystem resources are expendable in the process of capital and technological expansion and resource extraction. Now in the era of global climate change, we find out they are not.”
Robert Lundahl & Associates, LLC is a global film, video and multimedia production company specializing in environmental sustainability. More information about Unconquering the Last Frontier is available at: www.unconquering.org.
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Mark Chamberlain
BC Space Gallery
235 Forest Avenue,
Laguna Beach, CA 92651
949.497-1880
bcspace@mol.net
Robert Lundahl
Fine Art Photographer/Film Maker
www.studio-rla.com
www.robertlundahl.com
www.linkedin.com/in/robertlundahl
415.205.3481
robert @studio-rla.com
BC Space Announces Extended Hours for Robert Lundahl’s On the Road to Little America Exhibit
BC Space hours will be extended in late November as the gallery will be open on three pre-holiday weekends. The dates and times are November 17th and 18th, November 24th and 25th, and December 1st and 2nd, from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
On the Road to Little America features photographs of the American West made from 1979 to 2003. Images of culturally evocative landscapes have been intricately restored, retouched, and printed as deeply colorful large scale (17″ x 25″) Ultrachrome® prints. Scenes dated by artifacts like cigarette machines and platform shoes appear otherwise contemporary, providing a temporal “twist.”
Robert Lundahl began photographing in his early twenties, despite the best counsel of teachers, parents, and friends. “People would say that I was searching, and meant it in a less than flattering way. I was supposed to know where I was going, but wondered who among us does. I was reading Kerouac, Henry Miller and the rest, studying Buddhism, Hinduism, and listening to Alan Watts on the radio. I had the sense that life was in constant motion and that ‘goals’ are often only fleeting projections of my own and others expectations. I wanted to learn to ‘see’ rather than just ‘look,’ and the search itself became the goal, unconditioned by my own desires, fears, and fantasies.”
Lundahl’s images include colorful scenes of ordinary life gathered along the highways of the western states, juxtaposed against stark black and white distillations of the cultural icons he began defining. The early imagery, dating from the late ’70s, has a nostalgic and oddly charming quality. Dairy Queen and Morning in America (which depicts Ronald Reagan on television in a forlorn hotel room) portray a seemingly more innocent time; and yet they appear as harbingers of dangers ahead. More contemporary work such as Fueling and Beware of the Dog, in turn, become rather ominous artifacts of America’s post 911 reality.
The landscapes in On the Road to Little America remain more symbolic than literal. The abiding question of “Where are we going?” is expressed in the invocation of scale in Little America, a real place in Wyoming from which the show gains its name. This image portrays a lineup of bright red, gasoline tanks emblazoned with big white letters. “It was claimed as the ‘world’s largest gas station.’ A place that highway billboards advertised for over 500 miles. Once there, however, the tanks appeared small, rusted, and of little consequence.”
Numbered and signed photographs are available for purchase, and custom sizes and framing may be ordered.
ARTIST STATEMENT
7/20/08
On the Road to Little America–Monograph and Exhibit
Liminality and the Deconstruction of Culture
When we are on the road, we are outside of ourselves and outside of our comfort zones. We are in, what the writer John Boyd (Native/Elwha Klallam) refers to as a “liminal space.” Liminal, from Latin (limen), means “threshold.” It reflects the transition from one state of being into another.
Liminality is a period of transition where normal limits to thought, self-understanding, and behavior are dissolved, leading to new perspectives.
A darker characteristic of liminality is expressed in the Bardo, the Tibetan concept of an intermediate state between life and death. For some, it can become a place of danger, where karmically created hallucinations can impel one into a less desirable birth.
On the Road to Little America, takes us on a journey through the American West, where opportunities for new perspectives exist side by side with unspeakable dangers. Amid a landscape including the wreckage of used military equipment (Aeros), dark fields flooded with toxic pesticides (Gonzales), and unmitigated anger and vile thoughts (Beware of the Dog), exist moments of simple encounters (Private Coach), freedom (The Summer of No Jobs and No Women, aka Homage to Eakins), and impossible sweetness (The Red Bucket).
These are the emotional artifacts of culture. The landscapes that are visible outside us reside within us. If we want to know where we are, and therefore, where we are going, we need to deconstruct these archetypes. We need to gain a better understanding of the land, the place and ourselves. That is rightly the role of art and film.
As a film maker and a photographer, I see our common experience as an ongoing narrative. It is an unfolding story whose beginning lies in the mists of time before us, and whose ending is not yet known. In this context, our lives are liminal expressions of the flow of history and the accumulation of knowledge.
I want to express gratitude to Mark Chamberlain and BC Space and all others who have made this exhibit and monograph possible.
–Robert Lundahl, Laguna Beach, CA
http://issuu.com/advocacyfilms/docs/bc_web
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10/26/07
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
PRESS CONTACTS:
Lisa Oliver
Gallerie Eduard
1392 E. Palomar St. #305,
Chula Vista, CA
sassyqnb1@aol.com
619.227.0937
Robert Lundahl
Fine Art Photographer/Film Maker
robert@studio-rla.com
www.studio-rla.com
www.robertlundahl.com
www.linkedin.com/in/robertlundahl
“Invisible to the Eye,” Robert Lundahl’s Exhibit of Fine Art Photographs, Opens in Chula Vista.
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
-Antoine de Saint Exupéry, “The Little Prince.”
Chula Vista, California– Robert Lundahl’s “Invisible to the Eye,” opening Sunday, October 28th from 5 p.m. until 8 p.m. at Chula Vista’s Gallerie Eduard (Eduard – A Taste of Europe, 1392 E. Palomar St. #305, Chula Vista), presents us with a collection of representational images in black and white and color, expressing moments of surprise, fascination and delight.
Irony is overrated, says Lundahl, 52, a film maker and photographer who has carried a camera around his neck since the age of 20. It has always been acceptable for photographers to point out the incongruous, the hypocritical and the absurd. Life is full of those things. What is more elusive is the sensation of being fully in the moment, when we feel harmony within and around us. Indeed, Lundahl’s images present casual reflections on subjects as diverse as an afternoon at the lake (“Teenagers at Lake Crescent,” 2005), and an overheated polar bear napping comfortably in an obviously man made environment (“Polar Bears,” 1995). What unites them is an internal, emotional connection to a moment, to light and to space. The titles are deceptively simple; when examined from the heart, the images transcend the eye’s ability to intellectualize.
Unlike French master photographer Henri Cartier Bresson’s interpretation of “The Decisive Moment,” which has influenced traditional photography for six decades, Lundahl’s images convey a state of emotional suspension. Beyond simply freezing an instant with a camera shutter, they’re an attempt to consider the meaning of time as it is–in the process of slipping away. The impossibly beautiful afternoon light glowing on a simple home, or a moment of repose with feet up on the deck of a boat, elicit longing for a moment that has not yet completely faded, but surely will. “Invisible to the Eye” will be on exhibit until January 28th, 2008.
Eduard – A Taste of Europe, opened in 2004 as a retail bakery and pastry shop. Eduard’s goal is to bring the ambience and culinary experiences found in Paris, France to the community of Otay Ranch in Chula Vista, California. Delectables to be served at the opening include free macaroons in variety of flavors with coffee. A French supper Cassoulet in an Artisan Bread Bowl will be offered for $9.50. There will be drawings for Thanksgiving fresh Pumpkin and Apple Pies. Twenty percent of photography sales revenues will be donated to Chula Vista Elementary School District educational programs. The artist will be present.
Normal business hours are Tues.-Sat.: 8 a.m. – 8 p.m. Sunday: 9 a.m. – 3 p.m.
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
PRESS CONTACTS:
March 14, 2007
Odd Art Gallery
Maureen Wall
360.417.3911
revival@wavecable.com
Robert Lundahl
Photographer | Film Maker
415.205.3481
robert@studio-rla.com
www.robertlundahl.com
www.studio-rla.com
Robert Lundahl’s “Real and Imagined” exhibit of fine art photography combines traditional and digital photographic forms.
Real and Imagined Opening March 22, 2007, 5:00 until 8:00 p.m. Odd Art Gallery, 316 W. 1st. Street, Port Angeles, WA, Until April 26, 2007.
SAN FRANCISCO AND PORT ANGELES–As a young artist, filmmaker and photographer, Robert Lundahl looked to the masters for inspiration. “I took a lesson from the greats of photography, emulating their work and engaging in an imaginary dialog with them,” Lundahl recounts. “Its common for students to adopt the perspectives and approaches of accomplished teachers, and paradoxically it’s a great way to find your own voice,” he says.
Lundahl’s latest exhibit, titled “Real and Imagined,” deals with paradoxes on several levels. First, it retrieves his early pictures, which express homage to greats such as Henri Cartier Bresson, Elliott Erwitt and Lee Friedlander in a series of traditional black and white film photographs. In “Real and Imagined,” these images are combined with recent color images of similarly iconic landscapes, captured with a digital “point and shoot” camera. The black and whites are matted and framed conventionally, the newer, color digital work is face-laminated on Lucite.
For Lundahl, each set embodies a process of reaching out to explore the potentials of the photographic vernacular. “The meaning of the photographic image has changed,” Lundahl says. “Just as the invention of photography in the 1800’s altered the social utility of painting as illustration and as illusion, the casual immediacy of digital image making and its potential for manipulation call into question what photography is today. If we can no longer trust that an image is objective, journalistic verity is lost. Photographs become more illustrative, more illusional, more like paintings.” Ironically, it isn’t overt digital manipulation that accounts for this quality, it is something far subtler, as if the availability and constant referencing of exposed images by the photographer leads to an easier reflection on inner landscapes than outer ones.
If Lundahl’s black and white images of piles of scrap transmissions, homeless camps and fading billboards are perceived as “real,” are the digital color images “imagined?” For Lundahl, the answer is yes. Made in and around rural Port Angeles, Washington in 2005 and 2006, the simple human encounters and “ordinary” scenes glow with a spontaneous light. “They are projections,” Lundahl says. “These photographs are about the way we might want life to be, not the way it is. Port Angeles is on a peninsula; however bucolic it may appear, it is land mostly cut off from the rest of the world.” Indeed, Lundahl’s digital world of “The Jerky Stand,” and “Teenagers at Lake Crescent,” invokes an emptiness that betrays the beauty of its rural innocence.
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
PRESS CONTACTS:
January 25, 2007
Odd Art Gallery
Maureen Wall
360.417.3911
revival@wavecable.com
Robert Lundahl
Photographer | Film Maker
415.205.3481
robert@studio-rla.com
www.studio-rla.com
www.robertlundahl.com
Robert Lundahl’s aerial images of the Elwha River watershed provide a final glimpse of an altered ecosystem in advance of dam removal and ecosystem restoration.
Over the Elwha–Opening February 7, 2007, 5:00 until 8:00 p.m. Odd Art Gallery, 316 W. 1st. Street, Port Angeles, WA, Until March 15, 2007.
SAN FRANCISCO AND PORT ANGELES–For almost 100 years, the Elwha River watershed has borne the scars of hydropower development. With the introduction of two industrial power dams in the early 20th century, the Elwha River, once a prolific salmon producer, was decimated.
For the past 30 years, stakeholders, including the National Park Service, Olympic National Park, The Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, City of Port Angeles, James River Corp., conservation groups and others have negotiated the decommissioning and removal of the dams, and restoration of the riparian ecosystem and fisheries, to begin in 2012. Lundahl’s photographs, commissioned by the National Park Service, document the characteristics and features of the altered river ecosystem, as it has existed for almost 100 years since the construction of the Lower Elwha and Glines Canyon dams.
Robert’s large scale (11” x 17”) and (17” x 23”) archival glossy prints shimmer with deep blues, greens and reds. Photographed in September 2005, the images reveal the turning of maples and a sandy riverbed. Armchair hikers will appreciate views of the upper river, normally a strenuous 35-mile hike up the Elwha Valley from Port Angeles, in Olympic National Park. Here, images of the “Elwha Snowfinger,” show a scoured land feature with little ice or snow to be seen.
There are twenty images total, spanning from the river estuary, across the watershed to the peaks. Photographs are archivally laminated on aluminum panels, offset from the wall with a box frame. Framed and unframed prints are available by order at the Odd Art Gallery during the course of the show. Gallery hours following the opening are Wed. 4–6 p.m. or by appointment. Contact Maureen Wall, gallery proprietor, 360.417.3911.
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