• Dust on the Lens
  • Dust on the Lens
  • Dust on the Lens
  • Dust on the Lens

Dust on the Lens

Jeremy Everett, Simone Jones, Richard T. Walker and Will Wilson

10 May
28 June 2014

Curated by: Michaela Rife (Guest Curator), Jonathan Middleton (Director Curator)

Dust on the Lens

Jeremy Everett, Simone Jones, Richard T. Walker and Will Wilson

Curated by: Michaela Rife (Guest Curator), Jonathan Middleton (Director Curator)

The Or Gallery is pleased to present Dust on the Lens, a group exhibition featuring works by Jeremy Everett, Simone Jones, Richard T. Walker and Will Wilson.

 

This exhibition joins four recent artistic responses to the desert of the American West, arguably one of the most conflicted and contradictory North American geographies. The desert is at once exploited and protected, poisoned and adored. With one eye to preceding generations of artists in the desert (from canonical sculptors to the anthropological projects of photographers), and another to contemporary realities of land use, each artist employs a lens-based medium to consider the site. Theirs is not the fantastical desert of mystics or the wilderness of pilgrimage, rather it is a land very much impacted by its human and technological histories.

 

In some cases these realities are confronted by introducing everyday technologies to sublime, protected sites. In others, the artist’s body is introduced to the image, complicating the expected relationship between the ostensibly untouched wilderness and the human. The nexus between the American desert and the artist’s lens opens onto crucial questions that demand the viewer rethink their place in traditionally accepted categories of nature and landscape.

 

Dust on the Lens is guest curated by Michaela Rife, a candidate to the Master’s Degree in Critical and Curatorial Studies at The University of British Columbia.

 

This exhibition is made possible with support from the Killy Foundation and the Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies through the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory in collaboration with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at The University of British Columbia.