“Colors from the Sea” is Paden City native Larry Tackett’s first exhibit of the magnified and enlarged photos of coral reef marine life he shot during more than 6,500 dives in the Indian and Pacific oceans with his late wife, Denise.

Many of the photos from their 30-plus years of diving have been published in calendars, magazines, books and promotional materials. But nobody wanted the close-up shots.

“They don’t really know what they are,” he said with a laugh.

But when a mutual friend put Tackett in touch with OI curator Michael McKowen, McKowen knew he wanted them.

Tackett first showed McKowen his people photos — the land inhabitants of Indonesia and other countries where the dives took place. He then showed him the colorful marine life from the dives. The photos were beautiful, but not unique, McKowen said.

“As soon as he started to show us those (abstract) photos, I thought, ‘Yeah, that’s it,”McKowen said, adding that color, texture and pattern top his list of favorite design elements, and Tackett’s photos burst with all three.

McKowen said the abstractness allows viewers to interpret the images however they choose.

“It’s a testament to Larry. He has a great sense of composition, a great sense of design,” McKowen said.

The Stifel exhibit features 60 of Tackett’s mysterious works, 55 of which Tackett printed himself and five of which Oglebay Institute had enlarged. One of those, “Mouth of Anemone”depicts a half-inch by three-quarter-inch section of the animal enlarged to 4 feet by 6 feet, the centerpiece of the second-floor gallery space.

Tackett said it was a thrill to see the hung exhibit; for years, he only had seen the photos on his computer monitor or in small prints.

“I was astounded. It’s really cool,” he said. “And it’s not just because they’re my pictures; it’s just to see the subject matter so big.”

One room on the second floor features two projectors, where visitors can sit in the semi-dark on a soft couch and immerse themselves in vivid, detailed imagery as Tackett’s underwater images silently fade in and out of focus on two walls

Source: http://www.theintelligencer.net/life/features/2017/03/photographer-creates-abstract-art-from-sea-life/

Stephen Mulkey is an environmental scientist dedicated to developing undergraduate and graduate programming to build society’s capacity for environmental mitigation, adaptation, and resilience.

Mulkey was the president of Unity College in Unity, Maine from 2011 through 2015. His leadership and forward-looking vision resulted in Unity College being the first college in the U.S. to divest its endowment from the top 200 fossil fuel companies, and the first college in the U.S. to adopt sustainability science as the framework for all academic programming.

Mulkey believes that higher education has an ethical duty to prepare generations of graduates for the extreme sustainability and climate change challenges of this century.

After taking his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania, he spent over twenty years as a forest ecologist affiliated with the Smithsonian.

Mulkey has served as tenured faculty at three doctoral granting universities.