CONFLUENCE AND CALDERA: TUCK FAUNTLEROY

Together, Confluence and Caldera probe the sparse visual aesthetic that has developed into Tuck Fauntleroy’s signature style of photography. To his eye, the unique landscapes of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and Grand Teton National Park are presented in forms more recognizable as postwar American abstraction than landscape photography. Bold black liquid splashes across the white canvas of an ice-covered lake; the otherworldly blues, golds and ochre found only in the geothermal pools of the Yellowstone Caldera appear as though dripped directly from a paintbrush. Fauntleroy frames our natural world in his aesthetic language, a dialect perhaps descended directly from Motherwell, Frankenthaler, Kline, and Pollock, but entirely his own.

Each frame incorporates a meticulous months-long planned approach, carefully timed to capture water as it carves a springtime channel into the frozen lake. Fauntleroy works in tandem with a skilled pilot, often hanging out of the window of a single-engine airplane while it swoops for every planned shot. Timing, seasonality, and tracking the notoriously mercurial temperature of the Wyoming springtime is paramount to each successful image.

Caldera presents the artist’s first focused study of the extreme geothermal landscape of Yellowstone National Park. For Fauntleroy, honoring the geologic and scientific singularity of the Yellowstone Caldera felt like an eventuality within his practice, but one he had to approach in the right way. The first national park in the world, Yellowstone comprises over 2 million acres, the largest nearly untouched ecosystem in the earth’s northern temperate zone. It’s also an active super volcano, with roughly half of the world’s active geysers.

Geologist Ferdinand Hayden led the first scientific exploration of Yellowstone Park in 1871, writing of the geothermal landscape, “Nothing ever conceived by human art could equal the peculiar wildness and delicacy of color of these remarkable prismatic springs. Life becomes a privilege and a blessing after one has seen and thoroughly felt these incomparable types of nature’s cunning skill.” Following in the tradition of Albert Bierstadt and Ansel Adams, Fauntleroy turns his lens on the park’s thermal basins, creating abstract compositions using the otherworldly colors of these microbial springs as they are; nature’s paintbrush.

Through his work, Fauntleroy expresses a profoundly human desire to capture and chase the ephemerality of seasons and time. His keen sense of composition and scrupulous play between negative and positive space tends to challenge our perception of our environs, hovering between the recognizable and the sublime.