An immersive projection of minimalist seascapes by Dutch photographer Johannes Bosgra will accompany the piece Dark Waves at the concert The Ocean’s soul on Sunday 13th of January with Dutch pianists Maarten van Veen and Ralph van Raat in Miami’s New World Symphony Hall. The seascapes flow slowly into one another in the video projection, just like in John Luther Adams’ Dark Waves the groups of notes flow into one another, both in the piano’s and in the electronic music. Frank Gehry designed the New World Symphony Hall to make video an integral part of a concert experience. For this Gehry made giant curved sails above the stage in his signature twisting and organic style, on which the video is projected.
Johannes Bosgra (1979, NL) travelled around the world to the most desolate places to capture the essence of colors, forms and shapes of oceans and seas into minimalist seascapes in his series Stripes. He uses contemporary classical music as an inspiration in the creation of his photographic work and explores the links between classical music and visual art. And he plays piano himself. Bosgra received awards by the International Photography Awards, Black & White Spider Awards and the Moscow International Foto Awards. He was president of the classical music festival Hortus Festival and has worked for the North Netherlands Symphony Orchestra.
Seascape series Stripes
In his Stripes (2018) series, Bosgra created images that exist in the liminal space between abstraction and representation. Likewise, Dark Waves is one of John Luther Adams more abstract pieces, it’s like a total feeling of waves. It sculpts layer upon layer into expansive waves of sound. The waves crest together in a tsunami of sound that engulf you.
The depictions of the sea reveal Bosgra’s deep connection to the representation of the sea by photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto and to the abstract work of the artist Gerhard Richter. To make the work, he employs an extremely precise and time-consuming process with his camera. And he embraces the unpredictability of the colors, forms, lines and shapes that this technique yields. The result is a minimalist geometric composition of straight lines that neither has a large number of representational elements nor commits to its abstraction. In combination the two elements yield images that shift before the viewers eyes.
Johannes Bosgra: “As Kandinsky said in Über das Geistige in der Kunst, music has been for some centuries the art which has devoted itself not to the reproduction of natural phenomena, but rather to the expression of the artist’s soul, in musical sound. Music is the art with the highest abstraction and able to convey emotions in the most direct way. I captured the seascapes I saw around the world in a minimalist, abstract form to try to convey the deep emotions that classical music evoke within me. The extreme precision that I apply in the process of creating the work, feels like playing a musical instrument and therefore lets me feel the emotions that I want to express in my images.”
North Sea, Schoorl, 2017 from the series Stripes
New World Symphony Hall with the giant curved sails above the stage in Frank Gehry’s signature twisting and organic style, on which the video is projected. (photo: New World Center)