Project statement:

I recently rekindled my romance with heavy metal during a three-year period where my home and professional lives existed in two separate cities. The weekly three and a half hour drive between the two was torturous. I was divided between two priorities, my career and my relationship. Metal provided refuge for my angst and frustration; it can make time pass for me like no other kind of music.

Through that filter of distress and restlessness, I connected with the North Carolina and Virginia landscape I was passing through. I saw in it an energy similar to my own. Engaging in a longstanding conversation between visual art and music, the photographs in On Longing, Distance and Heavy Metal, represent that energy. Made at dawn and dusk with a large format view camera, the photographs are complex and dissonant, sometimes barren, sometimes lovely, and densely layered like both heavy metal and my internal state. I have drawn upon the history of landscape photography to project my psychological condition onto the natural world. My goal is to evoke in the viewer a response to the work that is equivalent to the response I had to my surroundings.

My favorite metal takes the listener on a journey. The progression of sound is not necessarily predictable; it builds on a solid foundation, and layers instruments, voices and energy. It is complicated, often unbalanced, dense, and shares a story. A dedicated listener is enveloped by the sound, temporarily held inside the tangled web it creates. As I drive through the landscape of Virginia and North Carolina, I look for photographs that will hold the viewer in that same space.

Bio and contact:

Pamela Pecchio was raised in Atlanta, Georgia. She received her MFA in Photography from Yale University in 2001, where she was awarded the Richard Dixon Welling Prize for Excellence, and her BFA from the University of Georgia in 1998. Her work is in collections at the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and the Yale University Art Museum, among others.

Pecchio has shown across the United States, as well as internationally in China, Spain, Italy and Holland. Her work has been featured in ArtNews, Details, Camera Arts and V magazines. She is the author of two books, eight, an artist's book published by Nexus Press, and 509, a limited edition monograph published by Daniel 13 Press. Pecchio is represented by Daniel Cooney Fine Art in New York. She is Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Virginia.

Pamela Pecchio is a Charlottesville, VA, based photographer.
To view more of her work, please visit her website: pamelapecchio.com
You can also contact Pamela by e-mail: pamela@pamelapecchio.com