September 4th - October 25th, 2008

Artist's Reception
Saturday October 18th
1:00 - 5:00pm

Scott Nichols Gallery is proud to announce an exhibition of work by photographer Joel Leivick. Leivick works within the tradition of great landscape photography and this latest body of work explores the theme of beauty in chaos. Although seemingly dense and tangled, the repetition of plant forms in these photographs invite a state of contemplation in the realm of the garden. His large format photographs contain a unique combination of documentation, abstraction, and conceptual interpretation. Joel Leivick's photographs are exquisitely printed, with a wide tonal range and a quiet precision of means that recalls the work of 19th century luminaries George Barnard and Timothy O'Sullivan.

Joel Leivick is currently the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor of Photography in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University, where he has been teaching photography for 25 years. He received his MFA from Yale University and his BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has been the recipient of multiple awards and grants and has shown his photography in museums and galleries both in the United States and world wide.

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us."

From the concluding paragraph of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species 1859.