PHOTOS
Alicia Grega-Pikul
Susan Scranton Dawson has put her talent and energy into public relations, politics, community planning, film production, retail sales, entrepreneurship and interior design. Still, she told e.c./d.c. that it wasn't until she picked up a camera five years ago that she started doing what she really loves in life.
Her work was introduced to the public in an solo show titled "Around Here" at the University of Scranton's Hope Horn Gallery in 2006. Several of her bird's nest still-lifes are currently on display in the Everhart Museum's "Flocks and Feathers" exhibition. Ten of her landscape images are among the impressive regional collection on display at Mount Airy Lodge.
Open for viewing Friday, though the official opening reception is May 9, "As It Is" is the first solo show of Dawson's work at Laura Craig's since the gallery signed on to represent her. Dawson has come to describe her work with the words "still-life and landscape images," but it doesn't take long for the photographs to defy those expectations. "As It Is" is described by a gallery promotion as "a pictoral essay of what is real and beautiful, within reach, and in our midst." Dawson has chosen to capture the natural world, at home and in her travels as she so appreciatively happened to find it, but the glimpse she has given seems to reveal the secrets of her subjects' very nature.
Shooting exclusively in natural light, her eye gravitates toward the simple abstractions removed from the context of their environment. Her micro landscapes find the texture in wind-ruffled grasses, cirrus clouds, and river currents. Mesmerizing green mosses embrace round blue-gray forest boulders. Mussels form a "necklace" along the sharp rocks of a Maine shoreline. Eggs we imagine as warm lay in cold ice cube nests.
Water is predominant in Dawson's work. The eye moves from Autumn's discarded leaves preserved in a pond of Winter water to preposterous patterns running though the ice of other ponds. Maybe it's the all the same pond. With the context removed, we've lost our bearings and can see only what her camera demands. The effect is serenity. A welcome calm.
Her prints often juxtapose multiple images side by side in one print and do not dabble in color enhancements. The red-hued water in one series is the result of the reflection of red-shelled spring buds in their pre-bloom state, she explained.
"As It Is" has a "Spring edge to it" and boasts a lot of florals. This latter fact that seems to surprise Dawson even as she looks at the work in front of her.
"Most of them are pretty pictures," she smiled. "I'm shooting more pretty pictures than I would have thought."
Dawson initially hesitated to shoot flowers. It seemed too obvious; their prettiness to her. She began with a not so fresh Iris weighed down just after a rain shower. There are less sullied flowers in the collection, but she is clearly fondest of those she calls "rainy day women," likening them to aging women who are still beautiful, albeit in a more nuanced way.