At Sea, an image by Danny Conant is currently on exhibit at the University of Texas at Dallas in Fragile Connection: An Exhibition of Works from the Comer Collection. This exhibit also includes works by a number of prestigious photographers, including Ansel Adams, Brett Weston, John Sexton, and others.
From the catalog:Through recording the human form, artists can suggest a connection to the environment, document ties to the past, to a former era when an individual's survival or ancestral inheritance depended upon the land, and comment on our relationship to the natural world, which is in need of revival. Danny Conant's "At Sea", a portrait of a figure in a tightly cropped view, is rendered as a warped image, due to the alteration that occurs during the processing of an emulsion transfer. This distortion creates a reference to the seacitself, with its passenger at rest, flowing with the water and the waves (or the intrinsic way of the world), instead of struggling against the current. Perhaps Conant is making a suggestion that this is the type of behavior we should practice, as she simultaneously reflects upon human nature and where we will discover bliss, whether organic or spiritual.
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