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The KSU Hotel Gallery is located in the lobby of the in downtown Kent, Ohio. Exhibitions change each semester and feature artwork from the School of Art Collection. 

Location: 215 S. Depeyster St., Kent, Ohio 44240

Currently on view:

NOLAN PREECE – Chemigrams

�Ը������� University, Hotel and Conference Center, July 2025- July 2026

Nolan Preece (1947-), donated a significant portion of his work to the School of Art Collection during the summer of 2023. The gift highlights the research, energy and innovation by this uniquely talented individual. The School of Art Collection is grateful to Mr. Preece for gifting us so many of his outstanding images.

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�Ը������� Nolan Preece:

          Nolan Preece was born in Vernal, Utah in 1947, taking his Master’s Degree with emphases on photography and printmaking at Utah State University in 1980. A dedicated westerner, Preece has been a professional educator, lecturer and writer on photography all the while distinguishing himself through an astonishing photographic career that spans 40 years of prodigious experimental activity in all facets of photography. In the universe of cameraless photography Nolan Preece is an acknowledged master of the chemigram technique, as well as a virtuoso of numerous other darkroom and light room methods that both involve the camera and eschew its use altogether. As innovator and tireless experimenter, Preece has influenced and informed a younger generation of professional photographers through his encyclopedic knowledge of photography - its history, its styles and its processes.

                 In his formative years as a photographer, Preece was influenced by Ansel Adams, paying close heed to Adams’s arduous formal perfectionism and his reverence for nature and environmental activism. In the earlier stages of his career Preece produced evocative images that recorded changing environments over time - landscape portfolios of the United States and the West as well as his Great Basin wall series.  Later, Preece concentrated on producing more purely abstract photographic images of astonishing variety suffused with otherworldly presence. Over the past several decades he has rigorously experimented with a variety of cameraless techniques, pushing the envelope as it pertains most notably to the chemigram, an unusual technique invented by Belgium artist Pierre Cordier in 1956.  Preece has rigorously tested, refined and relentlessly perfected these cameraless techniques to produce radiant abstract forms and spaces brimming with startling hybrid effects engendered and enhanced through digital processes. 

         Preece has had a long-ranging acquaintance with the laboratory, studio, commercial, academic, archival and musicological sectors surrounding the making and the dissemination of the photographic image today. He ran a commercial fine-arts gallery in Virginia City, Nevada in the mid-nineties and has been a widely admired commentator and contributor to photography magazines over the years.  Preece has had a long and diverse history of commitment to civic and professional involvement in the arts, serving as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the St. Mary’s Art Center in Virginia City, Nevada as well as serving as

a member of the Collections Committee of the Nevada Museum of Art. 

        Retired from academia and engaged full-time in making and exhibiting his art, Preece, because of his wide-ranging expertise in the photo world, is very much in demand on the lecture and workshop circuit. He has had a distinguished teaching career as professor of art and curator having held academic positions in photography at Casper College in Wyoming, Utah State University and Truckee Meadows Community College. As a fine art photographer he is considered an expert on the origins of modern photography and the history and evolution of photography. With a specialist’s knowledge on antique processes such as Cyanotypes, Van Dyke Brown Prints, Palladium and Platinum Prints, Photogravure Prints, Carbon Prints, Bromoil Prints, and Salted Paper Prints, Preece is also highly regarded as a photo-laboratory management expert with expertise in digital art applications using software in producing fine art and graphic design. Preece’s deep capacity for wonder and his relentless drive are fueled, enhanced and elevated by his deep skill set in the preparation, printing, finishing and retouching as well as framing and presentation techniques constellating around the making and exhibition of fine art photography. Preece’s photographs are in the public collections of the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, the Utah Museum of Art, the Nevada Museum of Art, the Snell and Wilmer Collection, and his work is found nationally in numerous private collections.

                 With Nolan Preece’s most recent photographs the beholder is exposed to a unique cameraless vision that values the unexpected and the revelatory. The varied imagery that the artist produces have a textural or haptic feel that gives each print a charged, auratic quality. These forms or areas recall, resemble or suggest architectural spaces and biological or atmospheric conditions. 

                 The viewer senses chemical reactions that have allowed organic or geometric formations to appear, coalesce, congeal or disperse ---- primeval worlds suggestive of states or conditions hidden to ordinary perception. Nolan Preece has been experimenting with and updating the glass negative or cliché-verre technique since the late ‘70s. The process involves smoking or sooting glass plate negatives, chemistry and photographic darkroom procedures. The results

are amazingly organic and brilliantly detailed abstract works. 

                 Preece has created twenty-first century chemigram hybrids by embracing the versatility of processing and the accessibility of color afforded through

digital scanning and printing.  The results are composites or mashups that produce an electrifying type of visual presence. With some of these photographs,

the juxtaposition of a printed image with a chemical painting creates a spatial interaction in which the illusion of depth is provided by the printed image. 

                 Over the length of his career Preece has equally transformed the chemigram process through consistent experimentation.  Chemigrams are normally made on silver based papers or films with or without the addition of localizing products, and the process can be conducted under room light. The chemigram, at its core, (as Preece describes it in his notes: “…is a mix of painting, printmaking and photography.” The extended postmodern cliché-verre and chemigram techniques applied by Preece in the service of continuous advancement in his art have taken on a decidedly high-octane performative quality. Preece explains through historical contextualization:  “Ansel Adams was also a pianist so he likened the photographic one-of-a-kind negative to the ‘score.’ The print he called the ‘performance’ of that score which could be reproduced many times but with subtle differences.  I was trained in the Ansel Adams tradition of the fine print so I could see similarities between the chemigram print being called the score and the scanned in, digitally reproduced version, being called the performance. I work on 8x10 silver based paper to produce my chemigrams, a convenient size to digitally scan. Adams used an 8x10 camera to photograph and make his negatives…” He continues: “…I use the chemigram framework to make statements about the environment…chemigrams reflect my relationship with the desert where I grew up in eastern Utah and now the Nevada desert where I currently live. The desert is my home and my passion. These resonances flow through my work.” Not surprisingly, Preece has been a partisan of the environmental movement for many years. Several of his monumental hybrid chemigram works such as Chemical Nuptials (1987)  and Big Oil Finds Its Page in Time (2012) have become signature pieces for the environmental movement and for collectors. Such powerful imagery has clear suggestive undertones pertaining to Nolan Preece’s reverence for nature and his principled desire to protect it from depredation and environmental degradation. 

                                   –Dominique Nahas, Independent Curator & Art Critic