Jo Whaley: Echoes

Nobody sees a flower–really–it is so small–we haven’t time–and to see takes time like to have a friend takes time.  – Georgia O’Keeffe

Chaos reigns in the history of the earth, with its cycles of creation and destruction. Yet there is solace in the staggering beauty to be found in nature. – Jo Whaley

The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum invited Jo Whaley to install her still life color photographs among Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings to open a new perspective on the legacy of constructing modernist compositions. Combining techniques of painting and theater, Whaley suspends time and reason in a dramatic process of crafting photographs in her studio. The two artists share a love for brilliant saturated color and bold uncanny compositions that evoke the natural world. Similarly, their vocabularies of abstract forms challenge viewers to rethink the familiar, recalibrate gravity and the scale of the known universe. Yet, separated by decades of environmental and technological change, important differences emerge in this installation of comparisons that reveals a shifting vision of nature expressed in the specific world of each artist. Whaley’s twenty-first century photographic compositions express the decay and threat to a fragile environment unanticipated by the innocence of O’Keeffe’s radiant tributes to the transcendence of nature.

Whaley earned an MFA in Art and an MA in Visual Design at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work is collected and shown internationally, most recently at the Henry Fox Talbot Museum in Great Britain and the Museum of New Mexico, Alcoves Series. Her most recent publication, The Santa Fe Scottish Rite Temple: Freemasonry, Architecture, and Theatre, is exquisitely illustrated and available from the Museum of New Mexico Press.

Jo Whaley’s work is courtesy of photo-eye Gallery, Santa Fe.