AMoCA Collection | Untitled (car hood) 2020, archival pigment print, 36” x 36,”
AMoCA Collection | Untitled (forest fire) 2020, archival pigment print, 22” x 22,”
RAIR | 2019-20
Tonee Harbert | Portland, ME
Tonee Harbert is a photographer from Portland, Maine. His documentary and fine-art photographs have been exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Portland Museum of Art, Farnsworth Art Museum, the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, and others. He has received grants from Nikon, the Maine Arts Commission, and the Maine Community Foundation, and has been awarded a New England Emmy award for video work. Harbert received a degree in Visual Communication from Ohio University in 1986.
In 1998 Harbert completed a photographic/sculptural installation about the rural, rustic life of a Maine hermit. This work was published as a book Elmer Walker: Hermit to Herowhich was co-authored with writer Carolyn Chute, and the exhibition was featured on CBS Sunday Morning.
My current work considers humans’ interaction with the landscape and the way we manipulate it to our own use. Any purpose we impose on the landscape leaves a mark which may be overt, or faintly shows a past narrative. These signs/signals inhabit our everyday world, where they can sometimes take on the surreal quality of a dream. I use a plastic camera to capture/portray scenes from this world which resonate with my own interpretation and experience of moving through it. This work is not an exposé on humans’ misuse of the landscape, but more a reflection on our environment and our relationship to it.
In the words of late photographer, curator, writer and educator Nathan Lyons: “Photography is, when used with its regard for inherent directness, a unique and exacting means of isolating inner realities found in correspondence with the physical world.”
Roswell Museum and Art Center
Rair exhibition • Tonee Harbert "Through the Static and Distance" • March 21 - September 27, 2020
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