The Wellington B. Gray Gallery is pleased to present John Scarlata: Living in the Light, A Retrospective on exhibit from January 15 through February 20, 2010. The artist will give a lecture on his work Friday, January 15 at 5:00 p.m. in the Speight Auditorium. The opening reception will follow his talk.

One of the southeast's outstanding photographers and educators, John Scarlata has been an imagemaker for the last thirty-five years. This exhibition traces his evolution as an artist from his graduate school work at California Institute for the Arts in the mid-nineteen seventies to his most recent  photographs. Using primarily large format cameras and printing in a variety of photographic media from 19th century antiquarian processes to digital/inkjet output, Scarlata has created a  significant and exquisite body of work. From his early influences by modernist  photographers such as Edward Weston and Minor White to the alternative methods of viewing the landscape suggested by the New Topographics photographers of the nineteen seventies ( Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams, Mark Klett, etc.), Scarlata's images  invoke and evoke nature and man's interventions in the environment exploring complex interrelationships and subtle beauty.

A native of Long Island, New York, Scarlata studied photography at Brooks Institute of Photography and California Institute of the Arts, receiving his MFA from the latter in 1976. He subsequently moved to North Carolina and was a  Third Century Artist at the Arts Council of Wilson in 1977. Teaching positions at UNC-Charlotte and Penland School of Crafts followed. From 1979 until 1999 Scarlata taught at Virginia Intermont College in Bristol, Virginia. Since 1999 he has been the chair of the photography program in the Department of Technology, Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina. Scarlata's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including recent shows in Cuba and China.