Surreal 'Hipnosys'

BROOKINGS — Fans of photography, surrealism or even just classic rock would do well to make it out to the Brookings Arts Council over the next month to check out the work from Brookings artist Pat Neiles.

The show — titled “Hipnosys” — features oodles of work, mostly inspired by the similarly named Hipgnosis, the famous British art design team behind some of the most iconic album covers and band logos of the 1970s.

“There’s a movement in the 60s started by Storm Thorgerson and one of his friends. And they started out doing all the album covers for Pink Floyd, and they moved on to Led Zeppelin and all other kinds of like major albums, Peter Gabriel, everybody,” Neiles explains.

That group would go on to design the famous prism cover for Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” as well as the script name logo for Led Zeppelin, among many other famous album covers and logos.

Their work was a major influence on Neiles, who uses photographs of real things to make a kind of artistic collage that blurs the lines between reality and composition.

The show runs at the BAC until March 29. The gallery hours are Thursday and Friday from noon until 5 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m.
In competition, Neiles explained, his work is considered altered images.

But he always begins with real photographs of real objects and then begins to alter it. He gave the example of people trying to create a painting that looks exactly like a photograph — he’s just working backwards.

Neiles said he’s most familiar with painters, and so he takes ideas like “What if I took a Western landscape photograph and made it an impressionist painting?”

The results are visually arresting, whether it’s an image of a bowler rolling a red ball at Monument Valley or a collage inspired by Jackson Pollock made entirely of modified light.

“So with that one, I surround myself in black, do a long exposure, and put light in front of the camera and move it around like drawing or painting — painting with light,” Neiles explains.

“And I take multiple exposures of that, color them and put them together and make them all wavy.”

Neiles has been a photographer for more than a quarter century and said he has worked on these collages the past 15 years or so.

The show has several different themes, among them some older landscapes, he said, and some more recent work which features repeated red balls, hammers, scissors and pigs — they evoke both Pink Floyd album covers but also posdmodernist writing, specifically Milan Kundera or Don Delilo.

“The stuff I’m really into now is that the stuff the hammers and the eyeballs and like everything from real photography that looks like — very inspired by album covers, very inspired by Pink Floyd and stuff like that,” Neiles said. “But I kind of just piece them together as I’m going along and see what happens. You know, some people say this stuff has to have a lot of meaning, but I kind of feel, whatever you put into it, that’s what it is. I love to hear what people think that it means to them.”

The prints are all on one of three medium: Wood, metallic paper or torchon paper. The print medium itself has a large effect on the end result. The metallic paper gives some of the images a sharper edge, while the torchon paper images end up reading more as a painting.

The collection blends elements of both the Hipgnosis style with increasing amounts of surrealism — think Salvador Dali — and increasingly, other styles of painting.

“I know more about paintings than I know anything about photography — I know more modern photographers, sure. I mean, I know the biggies, like Ansel Adams, Annie Liebowitz and whatnot, but I really don’t study photography. I study paintings,” Neiles said.

Those influences show particularly in his landscapes, which definitely trend toward the starker beauty of the American West — Neiles says they’re all from West of the Mississippi River. And, he says, it’s important to him that they all remain, at their base, photographs.

“Like I said, there’s no artificial intelligence. It’s just filters and Photoshop. But it’s very controlled by me,” he said.

“That’s like a perfect example,” he said, pointing at an image.” And then this one is used with a smudge technique to make it look really like a painting, and then filtered over, like smoothed out. But that still started with a photograph. All photographs, that’s the Great Sand Dunes in Colorado. That’s my body. That’s a real red ball that I photographed — that’s the biggest think. It’s all photographs designed to look differently than we normally think of photographs.”

Linehan is the Beacon’s managing editor and welcomes tips and comments at BrookingsBeacon@@gmail.com