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October Issue 2004
College of Charleston in Charleston, SC, Presents Contemporary Photo Exhibition
The William Halsey Gallery at the College of Charleston's School of the Arts in Charleston, SC, is presenting the exhibition, No Man's Land: Contemporary Photographers and Fragile Ecologies, featuring the works of Edward Burtynsky, Emmet Gowin, and David Maisel through Oct. 16, 2004.
This exhibition of three contemporary photographers explores the contested terrain between man and the natural landscape in several global locations. Exploiting photography's power to entice the viewer, these images reflect both the beauty and the fragility of the earth, while illuminating seldom seen landscapes currently under siege.
The term "no man's land" was first used to describe the ground between two opposing trenches during World War I and implied that neither side in the conflict was safe in this zone. There is a kind of trench warfare being carried out now between the environment and human presence. Landscape photographers Edward Burtynsky, Emmet Gowin, and David Maisel have each spent years chronicling the state of the environment through their photographs. The artists' works draw attention to the precarious yet interdependent nature of human relationship with the Earth.
For the past twenty-five years, Canadian photographer Burtynsky has explored unfamiliar places where industrial activity reshaped the surface of the land. His surveys of the man-made terrain of quarrying, mining, rail cutting, recycling, oil refining, and ship breaking show that these incursions into the earth arise out of human needs and desires. Recently, Burtynsky photographed the world's largest engineering and construction site, the Three Gorges Dam project along the Yangtze River in Hubei province China. His work focuses on the explosive growth of Chinese industrial sectors and the resulting transformations of landscape as the country evolves from rural agricultural to urban technological.
Gowin has been taking aerial photographs of the landscape in the United States, Mexico, Czechoslovakia, Asia, and the Middle East for over twenty years. His most recent book (and traveling exhibition) entitled Changing the Earth (Yale University Press, 2002) explores how man's footprint has visually scarred and altered the earth's surface. The traveling exhibition will be at the Yale University Art Gallery and various other galleries. Gowin is currently Professor of Art at Princeton University.
San Francisco artist Maisel's work is comprised of aerial photographs of environmentally impacted landscapes. The series included in the No Man's Land exhibition is from Maisel's new book entitled The Lake Project (Nazraeli Press, 2004), which is comprised of images from Owens Lake, the site of a formerly 200-square mile lake on the eastern side of the Sierra Mountains. In 1913, the diversion of the Owens River into the Owens Valley Aqueduct intended to quench the needs of rapidly expanding Los Angeles. By 1926, the lake was destroyed and eventually led to carcinogenic dust storms. The lakebed has become the highest source of particulate matter pollution in the United States, emitting some 300,000 tons of arsenic, cadmium, chromium, chlorine, and sulfur each year.
This exhibition was curated by Halsey Gallery Director Mark Sloan, and is accompanied by a catalogue. Special funding for this exhibition has been provided by a grant from the Ethel Jane Westfeldt Bunting Foundation, with additional support from Dr. Robert and Lucinda Bunnen and the City of Charleston's Office of Parks and the Office of Cultural Affairs.
For more information check our SC Institutional Gallery listings or contact the gallery at 843/953-5680.
Carolina Arts is published monthly by Shoestring Publishing Company, a subsidiary of PSMG, Inc. Copyright© 2004 by PSMG, Inc., which published Charleston Arts from July 1987 - Dec. 1994 and South Carolina Arts from Jan. 1995 - Dec. 1996. It also publishes Carolina Arts Online, Copyright© 2004 by PSMG, Inc. All rights reserved by PSMG, Inc. or by the authors of articles. Reproduction or use without written permission is strictly prohibited. Carolina Arts is available throughout North & South Carolina.