Review

"Sphere City," Panoramic Photo Print.

Dan Rose
Recent Visualizations

10 a.m.-4 p.m.

St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church
6630 Nall
Mission, KS
913.236.8600

Hours: 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Monday-Friday, 10 a.m.-1 p.m. Saturday
Runs through: Feb. 28.

Artist's site: http://www.danrosephotography.com
Gallery site: http://www.stmaa.net

Dan Rose looks through his viewfinder and sees the same things as the rest of us.

The difference — not more or less, but more and less — is in how Rose processes that information, captures it and presents it to viewers.

On the "more" side, Rose's Recent Visualizations — which runs through February at St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church in Mission — includes several panoramic shots along the lines of today's featured image, Sphere City. On the "less" side, the solo show also includes a number of pieces which reduce buildings to simple shapes, vehicles to lines and curves and rusty machinery to a series of focal points.

"When I'm shooting, I don't see a car or a tree or a building," Rose said at Friday night's opening reception. "I see shapes and light and texture and contrast."

Rose presents those elements over a wide range of styles and subjects (and color schemes, ranging from the full spectrum to rich sepia to dramatically washed-out black and white). But if color and subject are the variables, compositional tension is the constant. Each piece has its key point off-center in some way, which Rose offsets and balances with a generous use of open space.

It's an appealing asymmetry, and decidedly intentional on Rose's part.

On one level, it's a visual metaphor for the creative tension that drives all artists. On another, Rose says, that unbalance deals with the way too many photographers perceive their immediate surroundings  — as mundane, comtemptibly familiar and bereft of interesting imagery.

"If I'm somewhere in the great state of Kansas talking to photographers," he says, "they'll tell me, 'I wish I was in New York, where they have all of those great buildings to photograph. All I have here are these hills and the sky.' Then I go to New York, and the photographers there say, 'There's nothing interesting here. All I have are these big buildings. I wish I had some real scenery to photograph."

Rose's sharply differing perspective is in part the product of experience. He got his first darkroom setup when he was 8 and his first paying gig when he was 16.

The other prime factor of Rose's artistic equation, though, has less to do with technique and everything to do with the spark of discovery.

"I took my first photograph," he said, "and it changed my life."

Photography changed the way Rose sees the world, too ... and now his work gives others a chance to see the world and everything in it in new ways as well.

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