A Bit About Me
Robertson Hartnett (b. 7/12/1975, Washington D.C., United States) I am a business owner and parttime ski coach that uses photography and sculpture to express my creative side. I've been fascinated with photography since I was a kid. My father was an avid photo hobbyist and I started with his Konica SLR. I have always seen the world through a photographic lens and am compelled to capture the elements in my view so that, at a later time, I can study the changes taking place and work with the images to create something new. Inspiration comes from the mundane and repetitive motifs found in nature and architecture because it allows me to use my keen sense of observation to identify and document items that some people overlook, bringing them forward and into the conscious.
The main subject of my latest work is a tree line on top of a hill on RT 63, north of Goshen, CT which is important to me because I pass this scene every time I head out to ski in the Berkshires. Part of what I like about skiing is the repetitive journey to the hill and sights along the way. I love the way the winter ebbs and flows, changing every day. Capturing this scene overtime and observing the variance is the point. My art-making process consists of using a capture device that is ubiquitous (iphone) to document the subtle changes occurring around us and cataloging this change through collage and repetition. For these 4 works, I stacked multiple images over top of one another, aligning the horizon, and altered the opacity of the images so they meld into one image, spanning days, weeks, months and years. By bringing the change into one static image, the viewer is presented with a concept that is familiar and foreign at the same time; questioning the timeline of the image, highlighting the consistency of change.