Robert Sulkin lives in Roanoke, VA and is Professor Emeritus at Hollins University, where he taught photography from 1980 to 2019. His work was the subject of the traveling exhibition ‘Robert Sulkin, Photographs 1985-1995, sponsored by the Virginia Museum of Fine Art. In 2016, a feature story, “The Experimental Professor” appeared in Black and White Photography Magazine, Vol. 197.
Sulkin has participated in over 200 solo, group, and juried exhibitions. He has received many awards in juried exhibitions throughout the country including Best in Show in Photospiva, Joplin, MO, The Academy of Fine Arts National Juried Photography Exhibition, Lynchburg, second-place awards in the Academy of Fine Arts National Juried Photography Exhibition and Photospiva. On four occasions Sulkin been one of five selected to receive the Qualex Award at the Photographic Image Biennial at the Wellington B. Gray Gallery, East Carolina University. Broadly, his photographic work deals with “the futility of the individual attempting to cope in a technology driven world spinning out of control.”
Sulkin’s retrospective exhibition “Robert Sulkin: Photographs 1973-2019” is now on view at the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum.
Landscape Interventions
Since the beginnings of the industrial revolution, the historic balance between humans and nature has been disrupted. The vagaries of the extraction of fossil fuels, mining, agribusiness, and land reclamation to serve human habitation provide troubling examples of human intervention in the landscape.
My recent body of work, Landscape Interventions, while acknowledging a human presence, establishes an alternative model to intervention by providing a personalized response to the wonder of nature. Added planes, inverted tones, and strategically placed drawn lines create visual and narrative tension while drawing the viewer’s attention to the flatness of the picture plane.
To view more of Robert Sulkin’s work please visit his website.