Lumen is a body of photographic work which explores the idea of transition in spatial, temporal, and conceptual terms.  The setting for all of the images is the Conesville Power Plant, an energy nexus connecting Appalachian coal country with central and southern Ohio.  Located near Coshocton, Conesville provides the electricity that powers the daily routine of nearly a million Ohio residents and businesses.

Conesville is the manifestation of our energy-filled lives.  It is also the natural outcome of Ohio-born Thomas Edison’s great invention, the electric light bulb.  As such, the power plant is a fossilized relic of our past just as it powers our present.  Those who use its electricity are connected to its history and positioned in relation to the power it currently generates.  We are as much complicit in its impacts as we are compliant in the necessity of its existence.  Lumen sheds light on these complicated relationships by sharing glimpses of the machines, processes, and people that together transform the bituminous coal of Appalachia into the lifeblood of modern living.

See "Selected Works" above for Lumen images and other work from the same project at Conesville Power Plant.

Photo credits for Earlham artist talk: Walt Bistline, 2019

Lumen is a body of photographic work which explores the idea of transition in spatial, temporal, and conceptual terms.  The setting for all of the images is the Conesville Power Plant, an energy nexus connecting Appalachian coal country with central and southern Ohio.  Located near Coshocton, Conesville provides the electricity that powers the daily routine of nearly a million Ohio residents and businesses.

Conesville is the manifestation of our energy-filled lives.  It is also the natural outcome of Ohio-born Thomas Edison’s great invention, the electric light bulb.  As such, the power plant is a fossilized relic of our past just as it powers our present.  Those who use its electricity are connected to its history and positioned in relation to the power it currently generates.  We are as much complicit in its impacts as we are compliant in the necessity of its existence.  Lumen sheds light on these complicated relationships by sharing glimpses of the machines, processes, and people that together transform the bituminous coal of Appalachia into the lifeblood of modern living.

See "Selected Works" above for Lumen images and other work from the same project at Conesville Power Plant.

See below for video by Hai Nghiem, Museum Intern, Denison University

Click here for link to the Ohio Wesleyan Sagan National Colloquium called "Bite" in 2012.  Abram was a featured speaker during the series, and the Fine Grain exhibition was part of the events as well.

Fine Grain Artist Statement:

This exhibition is an artistic exploration into the American food system.  But it is also a personal journey about my process of learning how to see.  I think it began when I took my students to an Amish farm in Holmes County, many years ago, and we asked the farmer to describe his life and his work.  It was an introductory Environmental Studies course, and we had spent a fair bit of time talking about agriculture, farm policy, agrarian economics, soil erosion, and other aspects of the food system.  It was remarkable when the Amishman began talking about the birds (his family kept an annual list of all the species they saw), the pastoral landscape, and his joy in being surrounded by the sights and smells of the farm.  I was struck at how constrained my view really was, how my training and my filters impaired my ability to be open, to feel, to experience the very environment I studied.

I realized that I saw, but I didn’t see.

I had no sensibility about art back then, and I have no formal training in it now.  But when I have a camera in my hands - and sometimes even when I don’t - the world looks different.  Instead of problems that I would otherwise think about, I see patterns - patterns which don’t require solutions or answers.  Instead of scientific inquiry, I see discovery - discovery that draws me in the way a forest path turns mysteriously around the bend.  These aren’t dichotomies, and I know well that science is replete with discovery, but the difference for me is the experience, the immediacy of vision, and the emotional sense of wonder.  I find that when I really see, I feel a connectedness to my surroundings that I have never experienced before, a transcendent calm.

It is much more than a recognition of the beauty all around us, though that realization has certainly inspired my art.  It is the epiphany that something like food - where it comes from, how it is produced, who the people are who bring it from its origin to my kitchen - something like food that was always a topic I could readily contemplate in a room with no windows is now a topic that requires my sight to engender my full interest and my attention.  I want to know more, and I want to see it.  It is an aesthetic encounter that I seek.

And so, Fine Grain represents my first public attempt to bring that topic of food to a creative sensibility, to share the way I see it with you and hopefully to bring you into that experience through the visceral and interactive modes of this artwork.  Fine Grain is dedicated to asking questions, to wondering, and to exploring, without the requirement of answers or decisions.  I hope it raises your awareness as it has mine, but it is not my intention to push your behavior in any particular direction.  If nothing else, I aspire to a shared creative enterprise, perhaps much like the Amish farmer who so enhanced my perspective.  Through art, through communication with one another, through experiential activities, we may arrive at new ways of knowing, transformative ways of being.  Fine Grain seeks to open those windows for you as it does for me.

Abram W. Kaplan

October, 2011

Click here for Kenyon College Rural Life Center story on the Fine Grain installation at Mount Vernon Nazarene College, Schnormeier Gallery in the Buchwald Center.

Fine Grain Artist Statement:

This exhibition is an artistic exploration into the American food system.  But it is also a personal journey about my process of learning how to see.  I think it began when I took my students to an Amish farm in Holmes County, many years ago, and we asked the farmer to describe his life and his work.  It was an introductory Environmental Studies course, and we had spent a fair bit of time talking about agriculture, farm policy, agrarian economics, soil erosion, and other aspects of the food system.  It was remarkable when the Amishman began talking about the birds (his family kept an annual list of all the species they saw), the pastoral landscape, and his joy in being surrounded by the sights and smells of the farm.  I was struck at how constrained my view really was, how my training and my filters impaired my ability to be open, to feel, to experience the very environment I studied.

I realized that I saw, but I didn’t see.

I had no sensibility about art back then, and I have no formal training in it now.  But when I have a camera in my hands - and sometimes even when I don’t - the world looks different.  Instead of problems that I would otherwise think about, I see patterns - patterns which don’t require solutions or answers.  Instead of scientific inquiry, I see discovery - discovery that draws me in the way a forest path turns mysteriously around the bend.  These aren’t dichotomies, and I know well that science is replete with discovery, but the difference for me is the experience, the immediacy of vision, and the emotional sense of wonder.  I find that when I really see, I feel a connectedness to my surroundings that I have never experienced before, a transcendent calm.

It is much more than a recognition of the beauty all around us, though that realization has certainly inspired my art.  It is the epiphany that something like food - where it comes from, how it is produced, who the people are who bring it from its origin to my kitchen - something like food that was always a topic I could readily contemplate in a room with no windows is now a topic that requires my sight to engender my full interest and my attention.  I want to know more, and I want to see it.  It is an aesthetic encounter that I seek.

And so, Fine Grain represents my first public attempt to bring that topic of food to a creative sensibility, to share the way I see it with you and hopefully to bring you into that experience through the visceral and interactive modes of this artwork.  Fine Grain is dedicated to asking questions, to wondering, and to exploring, without the requirement of answers or decisions.  I hope it raises your awareness as it has mine, but it is not my intention to push your behavior in any particular direction.  If nothing else, I aspire to a shared creative enterprise, perhaps much like the Amish farmer who so enhanced my perspective.  Through art, through communication with one another, through experiential activities, we may arrive at new ways of knowing, transformative ways of being.  Fine Grain seeks to open those windows for you as it does for me.

Abram W. Kaplan

October, 2011

Click here for Denison story and video of Fine Grain installation.

Click here for the Columbus Dispatch review of Denison's Fine Grain exhibition.

Fine Grain Artist Statement:

This exhibition is an artistic exploration into the American food system.  But it is also a personal journey about my process of learning how to see.  I think it began when I took my students to an Amish farm in Holmes County, many years ago, and we asked the farmer to describe his life and his work.  It was an introductory Environmental Studies course, and we had spent a fair bit of time talking about agriculture, farm policy, agrarian economics, soil erosion, and other aspects of the food system.  It was remarkable when the Amishman began talking about the birds (his family kept an annual list of all the species they saw), the pastoral landscape, and his joy in being surrounded by the sights and smells of the farm.  I was struck at how constrained my view really was, how my training and my filters impaired my ability to be open, to feel, to experience the very environment I studied.

I realized that I saw, but I didn’t see.

I had no sensibility about art back then, and I have no formal training in it now.  But when I have a camera in my hands - and sometimes even when I don’t - the world looks different.  Instead of problems that I would otherwise think about, I see patterns - patterns which don’t require solutions or answers.  Instead of scientific inquiry, I see discovery - discovery that draws me in the way a forest path turns mysteriously around the bend.  These aren’t dichotomies, and I know well that science is replete with discovery, but the difference for me is the experience, the immediacy of vision, and the emotional sense of wonder.  I find that when I really see, I feel a connectedness to my surroundings that I have never experienced before, a transcendent calm.

It is much more than a recognition of the beauty all around us, though that realization has certainly inspired my art.  It is the epiphany that something like food - where it comes from, how it is produced, who the people are who bring it from its origin to my kitchen - something like food that was always a topic I could readily contemplate in a room with no windows is now a topic that requires my sight to engender my full interest and my attention.  I want to know more, and I want to see it.  It is an aesthetic encounter that I seek.

And so, Fine Grain represents my first public attempt to bring that topic of food to a creative sensibility, to share the way I see it with you and hopefully to bring you into that experience through the visceral and interactive modes of this artwork.  Fine Grain is dedicated to asking questions, to wondering, and to exploring, without the requirement of answers or decisions.  I hope it raises your awareness as it has mine, but it is not my intention to push your behavior in any particular direction.  If nothing else, I aspire to a shared creative enterprise, perhaps much like the Amish farmer who so enhanced my perspective.  Through art, through communication with one another, through experiential activities, we may arrive at new ways of knowing, transformative ways of being.  Fine Grain seeks to open those windows for you as it does for me.

Abram W. Kaplan

October, 2011

An installation of four large-scale panoramic images, depicting farms preserved by the Ohio Department of Agriculture's Farmland Preservation Program, each photographed during a different season of the year.  Each image is 14' in diameter (44 feet long) and 20" tall.  The series is suspended using a custom-made, lightweight, welded aluminum frame suspended from the 60' ceiling of the glass-enclosed spiral staircase in the Bromfield Administration Building of the Ohio Dept of Agriculture, Reynoldsburg, Ohio.