Exhibit: Robert Langham III: Ten Texas Tornados and Other Stories

ROBERT LANGHAM III TEN TEXAS TORNADOS AND OTHER STORIES

SEPTEMBER 7 – DECEMBER 20, 2023

ROBERT LANGHAM FOCUSED ON STILL LIFE about ten years ago when he and his wife Katie moved their studios close to home to deal with her diagnosis of cancer. “I couldn’t stand to be more than five minutes away from wherever she was, so I started to work out of the yard on images that weren’t photographs of constructions I’d made or copies of little sculptures, but on images that could only be seen with a camera. My intention was to drag still life out of the painterly tradition.”

Ten Texas Tornadoes came out of that work as whirlwinds began to blow out of his imagination and into his tiny studio in the downstairs of AC Gentry’s (1973 Texas Artist of the Year), home. He considered these images “kinetic still life” that depended on the camera’s ability to see time. Blending flash, extended and multiple exposures, motion, responding to the flower, mushroom or leaf of the season, looking at ice, fire, and balance, this body of work grew. He was determined to use ordinary objects within arm’s reach, trusting that miraculous exotic images were already in front of his face… he just had to learn to see them.

Tyler, Texas native Langham's home is in an obscure terminus of the upper Blackford Creek watershed. His work is deeply regional, reaching into the Texan psyche to explore the whimsy, possibilities, and ideas that appear within the imagination.

A former assistant at the Ansel Adams workshops in Yosemite, Langham is included in regional and national museums and collections across the US. He is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow in photography.