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Community Corner

Weekend Spotlight: Art Meets Nature At North Fork Audubon Society

Check out artwork from Koichiro Kurita and hear a presentation on Henry David Thoreau this weekend in Greenport.

Looking back, Diana Van Buren, president of the North Fork Audubon Society in Greenport tells of her first encounter with artist Koichiro Kurita: “I was at the Southold Fish Market and saw Koichiro’s postcard offering a workshop in pinhole photography. I had studied photography in college and thought it would be interesting.”  A friendship was forged between the two and a seed of a partnership between Audubon and Koichiro Kurita’s photography was planted.

 Three years later, Koichiro Kurita’s Beyond Spheres Project and the North Fork Audubon Society have collaborated to create a month-long offering of art and nature workshops for all ages.  The opening reception is Saturday from 3 to 6 pm at the Red House, North Fork Audubon Society at on Route 48 in Greenport.

The first event is Friday at 7:30 p.m. with “A Walk in the Woods with Henry David Thoreau." On Saturday at 3 p.m., Thoreau expert Jeffrey Cramer will give a short talk entitled “Nature, Art and Man: A Transcendentalist View,” followed by the opening reception for photographer Kurita’s exhibition.

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“I had a fateful encounter with Thoreau’s "Walden" and was moved by its absolute freedom of the spirit and ability to enjoy harmony with nature, unconstrained by society’s rules," Kurita said. "It was so close to the Asian way of understanding nature. Deeply inspired, I quit commercial photography and retreated to the mountains to start photographing nature. Each surface in the world of nature has a connecting border to the next surface. Each connection contributes to a harmony of nature as a whole. My work is the expression of these mysterious junctures and an exploration of the connections between myself and nature.”

Koichiro’s works have been collected by major museums including The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Princeton Art Museum, The Fogg Museum at Harvard, George Eastman House, Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, Biblioteque Nationale de Paris and Tokyo Fuji Art Museum to name a few.

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Part of the mission statement of the Beyond Spheres Project is:

“… By visually retracing Thoreau’s footsteps through the use of an antique photographic process of great simplicity BSP will further emphasize the philosophical relationship between humans and nature. Through a combination of Thoreau’s philosophy, traditional photographic methods and art education the Beyond Spheres Project hopes to suggest a new artistic paradigm.”

Thoreau would have loved the Red House and Kurita’s photographs and his dedication to keeping a traditional photographic art form alive. William Henry Fox Talbot, a contemporary of Thoreau, created the calotype process in 1841.

June and July are busy months at the Red House.  Please take time to visit the “Landscapes” exhibit, attend a lecture, a workshop, and walk the trails.

“Nature will bear the closest inspection," Thoreau once said. "She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf and take an insect view of its plain.”

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