Artist hits 90 with new exhibit

Nestled among the bars and odd clothing shops of East Carson Street is the Silver Eye Center for… Nestled among the bars and odd clothing shops of East Carson Street is the Silver Eye Center for Photography, a two-story building brimming with photos from Pittsburgh and around the world. Now, this small building will host a very big name, Aaronel deRoy Gruber, in ‘The Analytical Eye,’ an exhibit that celebrates her keen, if unusual, photographic style. ‘It seemed to me that it would be interesting to take a look at her work from a bird’s eye view, and to get a sense of her eye and her vision,’ said Linda Benedict-Jones, co-curator of the exhibit. Gruber, who recently celebrated her 90th birthday, has the city in her blood. Born in Pittsburgh in 1918 and educated at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon), Gruber has long been at the forefront of the city’s art scene ‘mdash; and not just in photography. Gruber worked as a painter and a sculptor before she finally began experimenting with a camera. ‘She’s very rarely content to do things that she’s done before,’ said Benedict-Jones. ‘Really, her whole career is a sort of demonstration of that.’ Now, however, it’s safe to say that Gruber has settled on a medium that fits her eccentric, creative impulses. Upon entering, viewers are greeted with a diverse collage of some of her best-known photographs: Pittsburgh from different vistas, desolate industrial wastelands and deserts. The pictures range from atmospheric (a lush, teaming garden) to abstract (the Phipps Conservatory turned into an almost colorless, alien landscape) to downright eerie (a doll’s head lying at the bottom of a cobblestone street). But what visitors will probably notice first isn’t the beauty or globe-spanning nature of the photographs, but their color schemes. Many photos, such as her famous ‘Downtown Pittsburgh Skyscrapers from Mount Washington,’ retain a surreal, dream-like essence, stemming from the fact that they’ve been painted over by hand. Other photos turn ordinary environments inside-out with infrared. ‘There was a moment about 10 or 15 years ago when infrared was in,’ said Graham Shearing, art critic and co-curator of the exhibit. ‘She came in at that time and she continued to do it, whereas other people are rather less in evidence now. When she hangs on to something that she finds interesting, she hangs on.’ Amanda Bloomfield, communications manager and acting curator of Silver Eye, agrees. ‘Aaronel is a strong woman with an incredible work ethic,’ said Bloomfield in an e-mail. ‘She is fearless about photographing in unusual places, like fenced-in dilapidated steel mills or underneath bridges.’ Often, Gruber will focus on the lesser-photographed aspects of a scene, rather than the obvious, generically beautiful vistas. ‘ ‘All of her photographs are unexpected,’ said Shearing. ‘There’s a very early color photograph of a village in France … If she turned her camera half an inch in any other direction, she would have gotten one of the greatest views in Europe. But what she’s done is taken a photograph of a shack, which is a rather interesting, formal arrangement.’ Of particular interest to Gruber is the city of Pittsburgh. Some of her most iconic photos portray industrial desolation in gloomy shades of gray. ‘I think people see her photographs of the ruins of the industry, [and] people are grabbed by those images in personal ways,’ said Shearing. But Gruber isn’t interested in just focusing on Pittsburgh’s past industries. In ‘The Analytical Eye,’ visitors can see the old and the new of Pittsburgh, its industrial past and its green future (as seen in ‘Downtown Pittsburgh Skyscrapers from Mount Washington’). ‘Most people outside of Pittsburgh now think of Pittsburgh as being a black and smoky city, which is the very opposite. [‘Downtown Pittsburgh Skyscrapers from Mount Washington’] is printed in silvers and light greens. It comes out as kind of a rebuff to the perceived view,’ said Shearing. All in all, one thing remains constant throughout Gruber’s different projects: her unfailingly sharp eye. ‘ ‘I do believe that Aaronel has an eye that is very attracted to formal elements, to design principles, to the way things can literally work together in a frame in an interesting, formal way,’ said Benedict-Jones. ‘She can analyze a scene and translate that three-dimensional reality into a two-dimensional plane.’ Gruber’s work has been on display many times before ‘mdash; museums and corporations seem to gobble it up ‘mdash; but this is the first time visitors will be able to experience the full breadth of her photography in one exhibit. And the best thing about it? It’s just a short bus ride away. Gruber could not be reached for comment.