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The Maloof Gallery

Artist's Statement

CHIP SIMONE: THE SILENCE and THE DANCE
"Certain events in life are like that, lying in wait for you to chance by, patient as rain"
Geoff Dyer - but beautiful: a book about jazz

Surprises come to those who expect them. The photographs in this exhibition came about just that way. I went looking for them but I never saw them coming. I explored the city. Sometimes I walked, but more often I rode a bicycle and traced eccentric routes through the prosaic urban landscape hoping to see it for the first time. I lurched along trusting happenstance and serendipity; wishing for epiphanies and praying for the sliver of light or queer shadow that fell just so and transformed the ordinary into the extraordinary.

The Silence and the Dance
The artist moves in silence tracing long thin lines in time hoping to reinvent the circle. My photographs are spontaneous and improvisational. Like jazz music the images spring from the moment while being informed by everything that led up to that moment. Photography involves two ways of experiencing time. One is the long scanning trance, the obsessive search for the moving clue and fleeting revelation. The other is the joyous incandescent rapture that happens at the sight of something out of the ordinary and oddly wondrous. One leads to the other. Then it begins again. This is the silence and the dance. These photographs were made over the past few years but the prints were made quite recently. It was only in the past year or so that I felt it possible for me to invest the print with the emotional resonance that I felt when I first saw the picture. New technologies have made it possible to realize old standards. Most of these images are being shown for the first time and in a way that enables the viewer to sense not only the allure of each picture but to get a sense of the overarching vision that links them to each other.

Chip Simone

Copyright 2010

Biography: Chip Simone