Nobody likes the repo-man… unless of course Mother Nature is doing the repo. That’s exactly what photographer Robin Blackshire has captured: the natural cycle of manufactured goods being reclaimed by the earth and its elements. In her series exhibited at Migration, Robin uses recollections of her childhood environment in her digitally enhanced photographs. The "junked cars and trucks" that her father frequently brought home and stored in the family’s backyard offered her a plethora of lighting and composition possibilities. The color of the automobile paint and the wear of the metal were always developing, as were the natural elements surrounding the abandoned vehicles. And, the varied effects of the sun’s rays on any given day made a walk through her own backyard an artist’s dream.
Aside from showing the interaction of decay and growth, Robin’s photographs exploit the color of the automobiles using innovative digital scanning technology. The transparent film that Robin uses and the process of oil mount drum scanning allows her to give detailed, individual enhancements to each of her photographs. Slight adjustments to the tones of the hues in the digital files allow each image to become a color study of the original, improve the overall image of each photo, and give a cohesion to the entire series.
Robin got her start in photography by chewing bubble gum. As an eleven year old girl she saw an ad on a bubble gum wrapper that said if you saved fifty gum wrappers you could earn a camera. So she chewed gum like crazy until she had enough wrappers to get that camera. She took it everywhere with her, and her love affair with photography began.
Robin earned her BFA in Photography and minor in Graphic Design at Shepherd College in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Robin’s vibrant photographs have been displayed in such high traffic areas as the windows of Tiffany’s in Philadelphia, PA, and Tyson’s Corner, VA. This is Robin’s first solo gallery exhibition.
Migration will celebrate the opening of "Repossession" with an artist attended reception this Friday starting at 5:30pm. Please join us and meet one of Central Virginia’s newest photography stars.
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