Powegian finds art in the alleys
It was largely through happenstance that Poway resident Laura Uematsu, an artist who works in photography, ceramics and watercolor found the subject of her first exhibition.
It was back in 2005 that Uematsu found herself wandering the alleys of San Diego’s Barrio Logan.
“You’ve always been warned not to go down alleys because you can see shady characters,” she said. “But what I saw was color and people trying to make their alleys beautiful.”
Where she was was an area where murals adorned every house and garage. Since she always travels with her camera, she got down and started snapping away.
She later shared her photos with a fellow artist, San Diego’s Tom Adler, and they decided to set out to other alleys around the county in search of art.
“We just got hooked,” Uematsu said in a phone interview. “It gets a bit addictive.”
The Lyceum Gallery at the San Diego REPertory Theatre is collecting 45 of their photos for a new exhibit titled “Alley Art” featuring work collected between 2005 and 2008.
According to the artists’ mission statement of the exhibition, their goal was to show “beauty where none is thought to exist,” adding that no objects in the photos were touched or removed to stage the shots.
“Some of the photographs show a purposeful attempt to create beauty such as paintings on garage doors or meter boxes,” the statement reads. “Others show objects which have stories attached to them.”
The art will be displayed from Thursday, Feb. 18 through March 7 at the gallery, at 79 Horton Plaza. An opening reception will be held from 5:30-7:30 p.m. at the theater this Friday (Feb. 19).
The works on display are but a fraction of the thousands of photographs they took during the three years of work.
“There were days when we would go out and not get anything,” said Uematsu, a seven-year Poway resident who went to art school at Alfred University in New York where she studied photography and ceramic arts. “It was just really random how the right shots came along.”
Uematsu said that she and Adler have already discussed taking their project to the next level, perhaps by expanding the scope of their project to a global level.
“We were talking and he said, ‘How about alleys of the world?’ and I said, “Oh my goodness, I’m going international to photograph alleyways!”
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