North Gallery
Keith Ball World Series
August 4 thru October 8, 2004
Keith
Ball has been a commercial photographer in the Oklahoma City area for
more than twenty years, working on local, regional and national assignments.
Ball photographs for a variety of advertising, corporate and industrial
clients both on location and in his studio in northwest Oklahoma City.
Born and raised in Oklahoma, Ball graduated with a B.A. in English Literature from Oklahoma State University, and did graduate work in journalism at the University of Oklahoma. Taking up photography in the 1970’s, Ball is self-taught in his craft and shot his first professional assignment on 7-7-77.
Though primarily working in the advertising arena, Ball still loves
to produce fine art photography and in recent years has produced shows
at the State Capitol building, the Centre for Design Arts and IAO Gallery
in downtown Oklahoma City.
Artist’s Statement:
With my background in commercial photography, I have photographed virtually
thousands of different items and products for various commercial
applications.
But with this project, I had the opportunity to really notice
the details of things that I normally would not photograph, everyday
things in all our lives that I found fascinating- the textures of
the inside of vegetables, the well-worn homemade handle of an ax,
or the rust on an old toy airplane.
The way we view things when isolated on plain backgrounds is different from the way we look at the same items in the context of their normal surroundings or on a busy background. When isolated, we can concentrate on just that object, and see all its subtleties.
Also, we view the same items somewhat differently when seen in relationship
with similar objects, and series of similar objects.
Thus, we come to the concept of World Series. This show is an attempt to illustrate these relationships, showing pieces of our everyday lives (though sometimes not contemporary pieces) in the context of a series.
Technical details: all of the subject matter was shot with a 4x5 large format camera on transparency films, scanned and output to an Epson 9500 printer on various fine art gicle´e printing surfaces.
Special thanks:
Laura ‘the pixel queen’ Evans
Cameron ‘propmeister’ Eagle
Rolf ‘Mr. Hardware’ Strasheim
Sponsored by the Oklahoma Arts Council. For more information contact Scott Cowan or Karen Sharp at 405.521.2931 or scott@arts.ok.gov.