Tayloe Piggott Gallery is pleased to present Elements, a new series of large-scale photographs by artist Tuck Fauntleroy, on view from February 7th through March 21st. This new body of work showcases visually arresting, abstract compositions of our beloved, oft-documented regional landscapes of Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. Focusing his lens on ice as it forms on local lakes during bitter cold autumn nights, Fauntleroy’s new series challenges our perception of these well-known environs in a novel presentation that hovers between the recognizable and the unknown, the figurative world and pure abstraction.
Remaining true to his aesthetic, the Elements series visually displaces the viewer, furthering the artist’s careful play between negative and positive space introduced in his debut Waterline series. The result is extraordinary. The scale of each image is purposefully disorienting, the viewer lost in a visual journey of abstracted landscapes that appear immediately both real and unknown, rendered almost painterly in one frame and conjuring minimalist constructivism or organic patterns viewed through a microscope in the next. While the Waterline series captured the ephemeral moment in early springtime where rivers begin to run through intact snowscapes, Elements focuses on the colossal beauty realized as water changes from a liquid to a solid state as winter descends in autumn. In a fresh derivation from the Waterline series, this new body of work depicts the raw, unedited color variations that are found in the natural palette of ice.
Fascinated by how color is reflected differently by frozen and liquid water, Fauntleroy has devoted the last three years to these explorations, following the fourteen previous years of study that led to Waterline. Through personal discovery and careful mapping, on foot, by water, and ultimately, by air, Fauntleroy trains his lens on vast wilderness waterways, leaning out the window of a single-engine Cessna to capture the ethereal blues and mysterious greens of water at the moment in time when it first freezes and ice forms.
Emerging artist Tuck Fauntleroy grew up on the water in a small town in eastern Maryland, where the Chesapeake Bay is an omnipresent force in everyday life. He graduated with a B.A. from Bucknell University in 2000 and moved west, bringing with him a deeply felt connection to water and local waterways. Following his breakout solo exhibition, Waterline, at Tayloe Piggott Gallery in 2018, he was awarded an artist’s residency at the Four Seasons in Teton Village, Wyoming in 2019. Waterline also traveled to nearby Gilman Contemporary in Sun Valley, Idaho. Combined with his personal photographic practice, Fauntleroy has developed a professional foundation as a photographer in the fields of architecture and interior design over the past 20 years. Published in recognized outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Dwell, Newsweek, Powder Magazine, Backcountry, Mountain Living, Range, and Town & Country, Fauntleroy’s successful commercial and interior work is committed to utilizing the aesthetics of the natural world through a contemporary study of landscapes. Tuck Fauntleroy lives and works in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
