Allen Bryan

Comforts of Home

April 1 - May 2, 2010

Having taken pictures most of his adult life, artist Allen Bryan was diagnosed in 1988 with a genetic eye disease that causes a progressive tunneling of vision accompanied by color distortion and night blindness. He subsequently traveled to the American Southwest to experience its vast panoramas before his field of vision was drastically narrowed. This journey awakened Bryan's interest in photographing landscapes.

This series represents Bryan's attempts to connect the idiosyncratic, quickly taken photographs he made earlier in life with the more contemplative work that followed his diagnosis. As he tells it, "I see things differently than most people. I see the world in discrete sections. There is no periphery on the left, on the right, up or down. I perceive colors in my own unique way. Things appear suddenly or not at all. In Comforts of Home, using digital tools I am able to re-examine and reorganize my photographic life, creating pictures that question comfortable reality. And perhaps not incidentally, the working process of combining many images into one has seemed to lead naturally into a panoramic format - wider than I can see."

With a Bachelor of Science in Art Education from SUNY New Paltz, Bryan has been a teacher of art and filmmaking, a gallery owner, a jewelry designer and goldsmith, and a product photographer. His work is in the collections of the Center for Photography at Woodstock/Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, the Benedictine Hospital in Kingston, New York, and Marist College. Comforts of Home will be shown at the Smithsonian Institution International Gallery from June through September 2010.

Presentation of Comforts of Home is supported in part with funds from the Strategic Opportunity Stipends Program through New York Foundation for the Arts and New York State Council On The Arts, administered in Mid Hudson by Garrison Art Center.