Titled Lay of the Land, the exhibit will comprise familiar landscapes seen every day and rarely accorded much notice or reflection. Featured photographers are Doug Dertinger, Sparky Campanella, Shawn Records and HSU alums Noah Wilson and Sean McFarland.
Their approaches vary, but share a focus on the relationship between nature and man. “They prompt viewers to reexamine not only the world represented in the photographs, but our place in it,” according to a gallery note. “In doing so, viewers are given an opportunity to study in depth the intricacies and mood of the landscape and its impact on our very psyches.”
Dertinger’s series of black and white photographs “shuns sentimentality while encouraging appreciation of the land.” McFarland’s black and white Polaroid images, titled Pictures of the Earth, illustrate “how we change the earth and how the earth affects us.”
Campanella and Records represent landscape through large, color photographs. Horizons, Campanella’s ensemble, captures both naturally occurring and manmade horizons “to reveal the beauty in their opposing and complementary elements.” Beaverton, a series of photographs Records took in Beaverton, Oregon, portrays zwischenstadt (“in-between city”) and “the intersections of history, commerce, nature, and beauty within the transitory contemporary landscape.”
Wilson’s Partial Landscapes, a collection of ghostly landscape photographs, aims at the relationship between nature and man, “how it becomes us and we become it.”
The public is invited to an opening reception for the five artists on Thursday, February 12, from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. in HSU’s Art Building.
Established in 1970, the Reese Bullen Gallery is operated by students enrolled in Humboldt State’s Museum and Gallery Practices course. It is open from noon to 5:00 p.m. on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, on Thursday from noon to 7:00 p.m. and on Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. The gallery staff can be reached at 707/826-5814 or rbg@humboldt.edu.