category: TOPOGRAPHY
file under: #mountains #territory mutations #remote #human #inventiveness #landscape
No Ordinary Land is a collaborative project by Laura McPhee and Virginia Beahan that was published by the Aperture Foundation and exhibited at the Burden Gallery in New York City. A traveling exhibition was featured in sixteen major venues including the Columbus Museum of Art, the Herbert F. Johnson Art Museum at Cornell University, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and Vision Gallery, in Jerusalem, Israel. Beahan and McPhee each received John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowships and New England Council for the Arts Grants to support this work, and it resides in the collections of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Getty Center, and Houston Museum of Fine Arts.
Laura McPhee and Virginia Beahan describe their collaboration and No Ordinary Land:
“We have photographed the landscape in collaboration for over a decade. In our pictures, we looked at areas as remote and geologically youthful as Iceland and as densely populated and industrially developed as New Jersey. In between, we made pictures in Sri Lanka, Italy, Costa Rica and Hawaii. Our work is about human inventiveness in shaping the elements both physically and metaphorically and we strive to represent multiple possibilities for understanding landscape.
When we started this work, we began in Iceland, attracted by the knowledge that Iceland is a geological anomaly, a hot spot on a spreading center, a place where it is possible to see the earth at a point of origin, in the actual process of formation. As we worked, we learned that we are absorbed by the long paradoxical conversation between people and the environments in which they live and this became the dialogue we sought to evoke. We saw this expressed in the tenuous quality of Iceland’s major road, in the geothermal pumping station which supplies all of Reykjavik’s hot water, in the electrical generating station built directly over the center of the mid-Atlantic Ridge at the place where Europe and America divide.
As we have traveled and photographed, it has become our view that no part of the earth’s surface is unaltered by human activity. We have come to see landscape as a peculiarly human construct, places as much created in the mind of the visitor as true reflections of what is there. For us it is the combination of the imaginative and the unpredicted with the facts of places and objects that draw us to certain locations: the tracks of farm vehicles turned white by fallen petals, green fishing net spread over the land to stop erosion, a canoe hidden among exposed tufa formations in a lake drained to supply drinking water to Los Angeles. Nature and the human hand, historic and geologic time are inextricably bound.
We both participate in every aspect of this work. We use an 8”x10” inch view camera that allows us to photograph together in a way that would not be possible with a hand-held camera. Collaboration has been the source of a rich and continuous dialogue that has been aesthetically and conceptually revealing, and has helped to inform both our teaching and the art we make as individuals.”
BIO
Laura McPhee
Photographer Laura McPhee is noted for her stunning large-scale landscapes and portraits of the people who live and work in them. She is currently working in the desert west of the United States where she is chronicling visual stories about time, both geologic and human. A serpentine river cuts deep incisions in the land over ages. A gold mine on the edge of the Black Rock Desert has the earth slashed open and its ruddy interior revealed. A still-life found at the edge of an alkali flat reveals intricate details of daily life—a tiny plastic toy among shards of glass and rust, a penny, machine parts, and desert varnished tin cans. All contemplate the unintended consequences of humanity’s attempts to control and manage nature and how we use the earth and to what ends. A meditation on our material lives, the images depict our paradoxical approaches as we at once protect, alter, and extract from the land.
McPhee’s most recent monograph entitled, The Home and the World, A View of Calcutta, was published by Yale University Press in 2014: “This exquisitely produced book features a selection of McPhee’s works made in and around India’s former capital. Here we glimpse courtyards, living spaces, temples, and altars as both vestiges of the past and elements of contemporary urban existence. McPhee’s images sensitively penetrate the surface to show the blurred boundaries between social classes, the blending of public and private life, and the resonance between India and other parts of the world.”
The Alturas Foundation, Fulbright Institute, and the Van Alen Institute have honored McPhee with grants, commissions, and residencies. Major museums have collected her photographs, including the Amon Carter Museum, the Saint Louis Art Museum, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. There are five major solo publications of her work.
Laura McPhee is a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and lives in Brookline, MA.
www.lauramcphee.com
Virginia Beahan
Photographing the relationship between culture and land for over 25 years, Virginia Beahan creates luminous and finely detailed images that describe the complexities of this relationship in diverse geographic settings. Her eight-year project in the waning years of Fidel Castro’s revolutionary Cuba resulted in a 2009 monograph entitled CUBA singing with bright tears, and depicts a country struggling beneath the weight of history. Larger-than-life images of revolutionary heroes Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos populate the island. Sublime and treacherous bodies of water remind us of Cuba’s isolation, though it is only 90 miles from U.S. shores. José Martí’s words are literally written on the land as he reminds us, “Education is freedom.”
Beahan’s newest photographic work, Elegy for an Ancient Sea, explores the shores of California’s largest lake and the improbable circumstances that surround it. Both beauty and tragedy haunt the Colorado Desert and the Salton Sea as Beahan investigates the historical, environmental, and social issues that collide in this surreal and remote section of the U.S. Beahan brings a nuanced eye to the landscape’s fraught past. Through her visually sumptuous photographs, the Salton Sea becomes a kind of character, struggling to sustain life as its physical reality deteriorates.
Virginia Beahan currently teaches photography at Dartmouth College. She received a B.A. in English from Pennsylvania State University, and an M.F.A. from Tyler School of Art, Temple University. The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Smithsonian American Art Museum have collected her photographs. Beahan lives in a farmhouse in rural New Hampshire.
www.virginiabeahan.com
