September - October 2023
Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art
2004 Baltimore Ave. Kansas City, MO 64108
Gallery Director: Sherry Leedy
Catalog Design: Elise Gagliardi
Find us at: SherryLeedy.com
IG: @sherryleedycontemporaryart
FB: @sherryleedycontemporaryart
Front Cover: Granite Wall North Carolina
Photography
2021
Michael Schultz: Unintended Beauty
Press Release 2023
In his almost five decades of photography, Michael Schultz has created a unique visual language. The enormity of place, time, scale and humanity is always present, no matter the subject matter.
Unintended Beauty, presents images from two recent bodies of work: Grain Silos and Stone Quarries. The photographs of grain silos show us the texture, rhythm, and color of practicality, function and decay. The silos, made to perform a specific job, are transformed to a study of geometry and light by Schultz’s photography. The quarries, at first glance, seem to be studies in abstract patterning, but, a second look reveals vast stone landscapes, carved out and shaped by human determination and machines. The huge scale of the quarry sites is hard to comprehend until one sees the minuscule ladders scattered vertically throughout the stone and occasionally a workman, in a fluorescent safety vest, who looks to be the size of an ant. Neither subject matter was designed to be beautiful. Beauty is shown to us through Michael Schultz’s extraordinary personal photographic vision.
Michael Schultz was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship and an Arkansas Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship in 2010. In addition to his fine art photography, Schultz continues to work on photographing large industrial iron and steel foundries around the world.
The photographs of Michael Schultz are held in the public collections of the Guggenheim Foundation, NY; St. Petersburg Museum of Art, FL; The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; The Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Sedalia, MO; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; Dayton Museum of Art, OH; Emprise Bank, Wichita, KS and others
Wisconsin Silos Photography
Photography 2023
Twin Blowers, North Carolina
South Dakota
Vermont, East Wall Panorama
Photography 2022
New Hampshire, West Wall
Georgia Quarry Reflection
Photography
This exhibition is a sample of ongoing discoveries within two separate themes. Thinking back on almost a half century of image-making there is diversity in what interests my heart and eye. The word beauty has been a central theme from the beginning. It may be an out-of-date word, but I will stick with it. Beauty elevates the soul and describes the inner state of being in a place of wonder. I have always looked for subject matter that has an inherent sense of rising above its commonly recognizable form and that lifts me to a place of deep satisfaction. I respond to things that are often in plain sight, yet possess a “WOW” factor that comes by looking intently and allowing the subject to reveal its inner beauty. Photography, for all its innate documentation, has the potential to carry us into a place where reality begins to border on another realm, where the unintended beauty of the subject actually becomes something very special. It is more than just what the eye sees, it is where the heart engages in things that words can only play with.
What struck me about the pairing of grain facades and quarry environments was that both subjects are easily recognizable yet offer that window of higher potential. Neither silos nor quarries are made for aesthetics. They aren’t intended to be visually appealing; they are intended to serve a function. Yet I believe that both offer more. I became interested in quarries and grain facilities in the early 1990s. They were just part of my ongoing discoveries as I sought significant subject matter.
I remain active in making images, I think in part because I have remained inquisitive and love the positive pursuit of the elusive, always looking for something to reveal its potential. In a sense, I go out to take images; but maybe more importantly, they have come to me. It’s as if there is a space inside of me, kind of like a room, that loves to collect scenes of unintended beauty.
Michael Schultz 8/1/23