Photographers showcase iPhone art at the Red Brick in Aspen

If it wasn’t announced in the title of the Red Brick Center’s new art exhibition, “iShow,” most viewers could not guess that all of the works hanging at the gallery were created on smartphones.

The show, which opened Thursday night, showcases new work by 10 local photographers who have used their iPhones to remarkably diverse ends with the use of apps and filters, creative editing and printing processes.

On the realistic side of the spectrum, Katalin Domoszlay offers crisp color photographic prints of American landscapes and a shot of a blue drugstore sign matching a blue sky. The more surreal pieces include K Cesark’s photo collages of houses emerging leaf-like from the end of tree branches and Barbara Bowles deceptive and mind-bending compositions.

In “My Leadville,” Bowles has collaged digital photos of a zebra and a cardinal into a Leadville backyard. And in her “Ashcroft Sur Mer,” a woman is photographed in the doorway of a structure at the Aschcroft ghost town here in Aspen, looking out at waves crashing on a beach.

Summers Moore gives a playful wink to the new processes of 21st century photography and nods at the old tactile ones by placing her black-and-white iPhone photos of dogs on an old-school photo contact sheet and marking it up.

Kathy Honea’s “Petroglyphs” series includes 17 small works that mimic the aesthetic of actual petroglyphs. They portray some of the expected ancient subject — birds and animals and such — alongside modern-day creations, including a barn. The works, it turns out, were made by plugging photos into an iPhone app that makes images look like they’re on concrete.

“None of it is the kind of thing you would expect from an iPhone,” photographer Tami Solondz said of “iShow” at Thursday’s opening.

Solondz, in her first Red Brick exhibition, serves up “Thai Cock 5 Ways” — a series that places the same iPhone-shot image of a rooster into varied backgrounds. Solondz shot all of the photos in Thailand.

Like most artists included in “iShow,” Solondz comes from a traditional photo background and isn’t ready to give up all of her gear for a smartphone and a suite of apps.

“It’s all great, but I don’t want to lose my knowledge of photography and how an SLR works,” she said, using the acronym for a single-reflex camera.

Lisa Pendrys’s painterly series of photo collages places silhouettes of cows in impressionistic backgrounds. The cows, it turns out, are from early morning iPhone photos she’s taken at Crystal Valley Ranch. Titles like “Cadillac Cows” and “Cranbook Cows” hint at the fact that Pendrys has lifted the background landscapes from her iPhone photos of the rusty sides of vintage cars.

“I said, ‘Gosh, when you take these rusty patterns on these cars you can rally turn them into abstract landscapes,’” Pendrys explained. “So that’s what I did.”

She touched-up and edited the photos in the free Snapseed app, and layered printed images — as many as 15 of them in one piece — on top of one another.

“The show was a call to action to experiment on a formal level,” Pendrys explained. “My tendency is always to pull out my big Nikon. But this was a great exercise.”

atravers@aspentimes.com