Joe Pintauro “The Summer Kingdom”
June 25 – July 25
Please join us for the opening reception June 25, 2011 6-8pm
The show will feature high-resolution photography of the beaches and lifeguards on the east end of Long Island.
A Note from the Artist:
“I’ve been photographing on East End beaches for the past two winters and summers. I see the beach in summer as a kind of nation, a freshly constituted realm under a unique governance each year, a floating world of freedom from the land mass, from ourselves and the exterior rattling world. Josef Pieper’s: Leisure the Basis of Culture, a book from my college days, speaks of how once man is free from economic necessity, and even despite economic necessity, all that still matters in the end is art, beauty and love.
With this in mind, I photographed our beaches and their life guards through a lens of romanticism; stressing the landscape, its primitivism and the individualism of it’s life guards who oversee a thin stretch of sand before a massive ocean. A place which belongs equally to every man woman and child. Beaches, especially out here, near ponds and of soft warm sand can be said to be a summer kingdom floating in timelessness between heaven and earth, a place of sun, wind and water, ruled by Olympian sun Gods, men and women of beauty, prowess and responsibility, who sit high on thrones, overlooking a dangerously beautiful magical world, the kingdom of summer.”
