If Arthur Tress fell down a rabbit hole with camera in hand, I imagine his negatives would bare a stark resemblance to the sometimes eerie, sometimes enchanting, and always captivating photomontages of Tom Chambers, which will be on display at the Chase Young Gallery this June. Six of his pieces are also currently on display as part of The Fence Project lining the Rose F. Kennedy Greenway, a public art project that will be on display through the summer.
Armed with a Nikon D700 and Adobe Photoshop, Chambers assembles mythical untold stories, replete with emotion and the promise of movement–like a dew drop on a bouncy spring leaf–allowing the viewer to walk away from his work with a fully formed fairy tale spinning in their mind.
Drawing inspiration from other painters (Frida Kahlo) and authors (Cormac McCarthy, Gabriel Garcia Marquez), more so than photographers, Chambers works in magical realism, limiting himself to images that are “possible, but improbable.” While you could make the argument that a little girl dancing with wolves sounds as impossible as a certain Kevin Costner film getting a sequel of the same name, you can’t dispute that Chamber’s hybrid work always feels well-grounded in this world.
His ability to achieve this is in part because he has been tinkering with Photoshop since its release twenty four years ago. “I can remember when we got the program, and we were playing around with it and doing stuff like putting eyes in the middle of people’s foreheads and thinking that was pretty great,” he says. Since then the program and Chamber’s skill set has grown savvier, allowing the montages to appear polished and pretty, never campy or patch-worked.
TOM CHAMBERS AT CHASE YOUNG GALLERY. 450 HARRISON AVE., BOSTON. WED 6.4 – SUN 6.29, OPENING RECEPTION FRI 6.6. 6-8PM/FREE. CHASEYOUNGGALLERY.COM
