Joshua Whitaker and Blaine Atkins are looking at life in a different way than one might expect, and they are sharing these outlooks with the residents of Knoxville.
Whitaker, a senior at UT studying studio art, and Atkins, a junior at UT studying management, are showcasing their photography exhibition, “Unimportant Specificity” at Gallery 1010 on Oct. 30 and 31, from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.
When creating this gallery, the detail and hard work that went into it was something that these two students wanted to make sure that they captured and made evident to their audience.
“A big driving force in our show is trying to find things that people would walk past, and like, did not think anything of,” Whitaker said. “We’re trying to find moments like that, just in our daily surroundings, where the world is kind of interacting in interesting ways.”
In their artist’s statement, they focus intensely on detail and “draw emphasis on often overlooked objects that define everyday tragedy,” Whitaker said.
During discussion of their pieces, tragedy was not evident in their tone. Their faces lit up when describing them, showing the passion Whitaker and Atkins have for each piece.
Whitaker described his most memorable piece as one that he captured at Living Earth, a mulching company where arborists go to dump their brush. There lies a 60-foot-tall mound of pallets.
“There is something special about the difference in scale,” Whitaker said. “Thousands of pallets that are just unused and never gonna be used.”
While there might be more potential to photograph unordinary items in Greenback Castle in Greenback, Tennessee, Atkins finds a way to capture the less photographed canvases in the area.
“Inside of it, there’s like this kids’ playroom and it has this feeling of pre-rapture,” Atkins said. “As well as just a minimalist, outsider point of view of how they want to live their life, and I think that’s really beautiful.”
The raw and unpredictable nature of these photos is something that these two students found unique in their exhibition.
“It’s very photojournalistic, in a way,” Atkins said. “Something about seeing these objects in a gallery, you wouldn’t see these objects around more than likely, again.”
The two also took the time to acknowledge the deeper meaning and significance behind their pieces and the emotional attachment some of the photos may contain.
“A lot of the items I have photographed are items that have been kind of left outside [and] forgotten,” Atkins said. “A lot of them are considered whole, and I think that it’s upsetting.
Atkins and Whitaker explained what they wanted people to take away from this exhibition, expressing the importance of it.
“I want people to draw from our project how interesting the world can be when you really start looking at it,” Whitaker said. “You can just look around, and if you spend like 30 seconds looking at one thing that caught your eye, your perception of that thing you’re looking at will pretty much completely change.”
