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CLOUDS
Yva Momatiuk & John Eastcott

On view: September 8 - October 14, 2012
Opening reception & artist talk: September 8, from 5-7pm
Gallery hours: Wednesday - Sunday, 12-5pm and by appointment

The Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW) is delighted to announce the fall solo exhibition entitled Clouds, featuring recent work by the remarkable wife and husband team of Yva Momatiuk and John Eastcott.

On view from September 8 – October 14, 2012, the exhibition showcases Momatiuk & Eastcott’s sublime, large-scale images of cloudscapes taken from vantage points that are both dizzying and vast. Momatiuk and Eastcott (based in Hurley, NY) have travelled the world in pursuit of their love of photography and nature. Their latest work is an elegy dedicated to the ever-changing wilderness of the sky.

By turns moody, vibrant, majestic, and serene, the still images are captured from surprising and unexpected vantage points, evoking a sense of movement and wonder within the viewer. Some of the cloud formations are representative of lofty mountaintops, others evoke a tempestuous sea, while one is reminiscent of schools of multicolored jellyfish.

The photographers are inveterate travellers whose sense of wanderlust takes them on adventurous explorations across the world, allowing them to create images from previously unseen perspectives. The exhibition Clouds presents photographs that expand the limits of perception, and that challenge the viewer to look up, pause, and bask in the visual wealth that nature provides.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Yva Momatiuk and John Eastcott are internationally acclaimed photographers of nature. Nomadic for years, they settled in the Catskills in 1979 but continue to explore the rhythm, the light, and the essence of remote and mysterious wild places.

Born in Poland, Momatiuk fell in love with nature photography as a small girl, while watching grainy B/W documentary films of animals inhabiting dark swamps of Eastern Poland. Later she hunted with her father Mikolaj, a forester’s son, who imitated sounds of wild animals and taught her to quietly hunker down and wait, often for hours, for their arrival. She studied architecture, received her MA degree in Warsaw, and worked for a prestigious New York firm before she left the Manhattan landscape for a Wyoming cattle ranch where she got hired as a cowhand, walked with wild animals living along the Great Divide, photographed and wrote.

A New Zealander, Eastcott published his first book of photographs at 17, earned a degree in photography in London, and met Yva while hitchhiking near the Grand Tetons in Wyoming. Together, they took off for the North, fell in with Dogrib and Slavey fishermen catching whitefish on Great Slave Lake, and published their first images under shared photographic credits.

Later Momatiuk and Eastcott proposed a story idea to National Geographic and spent five months in the Canadian Arctic with a group of Inuit hunters. Soon they were authoring magazine stories and pictorials for National Geographic, Smithsonian, National Wildlife, Ranger Rick, Audubon, Nature Conservancy, Geo, BBC Wildlife, Stern, The Observer, Wildlife Conservation, Equinox, and Nature Canada. Yva and John, married by then, became a couple of roaming “professional bums”, to use their words, following their curiosity and desire to see, feel and learn.

They have traveled and photographed in New Zealand, Poland, Slovakia, Canada, Afghanistan, Chile, and Argentina. They followed the mustangs of the American West and created a book of images and a Smithsonian cover story. They spent many seasons in Alaska, the American Southwest, and river swamps of the South. They returned to the Canadian Arctic, explored pampas of Patagonia, the outback of Australia, the savannah of Africa, and the Pribilof Archipelago in the Bering Sea.

Momatiuk and Eastcott have published four books, High Country (1980), Mustang (1996), This Marvellous Terrible Place: Images of Newfoundland and Labrador (1998) which also became a theatrical publication, and In a Sea of Wind: Images of the Prairies (1991), as well as two children’s books, Face to Face with Wild Horses and Face to Face with Penguins, both published in 2009 by the National Geographic Society.

They are recipients of awards from the National Press Photographers Association Pictures of the Year, BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year, Nature’s Best and National Wildlife magazine competitions, and the annual award from the Alaska Conservation Foundation for excellence in still photography dedicated to environmental issues. Their images were represented in several National Geographic shows in Washington, DC, and in BBC exhibits in the Natural History Museum in London, England.

They currently reside (semi-permanently) in the town of Hurley, nestled in the Catskills of upstate New York.

To learn more about John & Yva’s work, please visit www.momatiukeastcott.com

CPW invites groups and individuals to schedule tours and gallery talks of the exhibition and facility.  

This exhibition and its related programs have been made possible in part with funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency, with support from Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.