Symphony

Front Room Gallery is pleased to present Symphony, a solo exhibition of mixed media photographs by artist Ken Ragsdale. Drawing on childhood memories, Ragsdale’s process-driven work is rooted in narrative and incorporates a range of artistic disciplines—including drawing, painting, sculpture, paper craft, theatrical lighting, and photography. Ragsdale’s forced-perspective paper diorama photographs are clear descendants of the Hudson River School of painting. Within these wistful landscapes, his affection for machinery is unmistakable—trucks, tractors, and classic cars punctuate the scenes, becoming central subjects. In the absence of their owners, these vehicles serve as poignant stand-ins, suggesting stories of departure, memory, and presence.

Each of the twelve works in Symphony expresses an emotion tied to Ragsdale’s experience of moments in a day—Morning, Noon, Afternoon, and Evening—repeated in succession. While each piece stands alone with its own narrative, together they form a continuous, flowing story that loops and evolves, echoing the rhythms of time and memory.

One example of Ragsdale’s layered approach can be seen in the photograph “Second Movement Morning, The Tent Trailer.” A pop-up camper rests in a quiet campsite, surrounded by desk chairs, a picnic table, a campfire pit, and scrub brush. The blue tones of dusk give way to the first light of sunrise. Ragsdale has hand-painted the leaves of nearby bushes directly onto the photograph’s surface, while the sky is overlaid with a grid of mechanically scored lines. Within this grid, a faint schematic floats like a constellation.

Continuing the series’ interplay between memory and symbolism, “3rd Movement Afternoon, The Combine” features a combine harvester resting in shadow at the bottom third of the composition. Rather than positioned among rows of crops, it is curiously surrounded by picnic tables, suggesting a campsite setting. The top two-thirds of the photograph features a sky that shifts from pale yellow to deep orange. Scored grid lines etched into the paper overlay the sky, where a celestial silhouette of the combine floats high above the horizon—simultaneously grounded and mythic.

Ken Ragsdale’s dioramic landscapes offer something entirely new. While echoes of 19th-century painters such as Jules Bastien-Lepage and George Clausen, or the New Realist photographers of the German school founded by Bernd and Hilla Becher in the 1960s, may occasionally emerge, contemporary artists like William Kentridge and Thomas Demand also come to mind. Yet Ragsdale’s work—rooted in distinctly American themes and shaped by memories of the Pacific Northwest—remains conceptually rigorous and unmistakably his own.