You could spend your life in pursuit of genuine wilderness,
without the promise that you’ll ever actually experience it. The buffer between
humans and the rest of the natural world is, if incomplete, fairly ubiquitous,
even when we don’t detect it at first. The revelation of this illusion is what
kicked off “Glass Mountains,” Sean McFarland’s in-progress body of work
currently evolving in the Project Space at Visual Studies Workshop.
It all started with a waterfall in Golden Gate Park. “It was
twilight, and I was photographing this waterfall — it was really beautiful,”
McFarland says. “I had to change the film back on my camera, so I took it off,
removed the film, rewound it, and when I looked into the ground glass, the
waterfall had disappeared.”
Because somebody had turned it off.
“Obviously, I’m not standing in a natural world,” he says. “But
that disconnect was insane, because it’s like, water, gravity, and the weather —
those things aren’t supposed to just completely change in a second.”
He began to see national parks as not different from, but
analogous to, museum dioramas.
McFarland is a visiting professor of photographic arts and
sciences at RIT, and moved to Rochester from his native California in August.
His work reflects his interests in our concept of wilderness, the impossibility
of wilderness, and the slippery nature of language.
Though the title of this body of work, “Glass Mountains,” is
taken from an actual geographic place in the eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains,
and other spaces around the world with the same name, the focus is not
site-specific. The project explores the idea of the natural world, everywhere,
and our relationship to it.
“Some of the core ideas from the project are looking at the way
19th century landscape photography mythologized the landscape; sort of turned
it into this series of tropes,” he says. “I think it also really fetishizes
it.”
McFarland says he is also interested in “how far apart experience
and record sit, like when you go see something and photograph it, and bring it
back, they’re completely irreconcilable.”
In addition to photographing experiences of artifice, he employs
many methods of subtle artifice in his work. At times, McFarland creates spaces
that aren’t real, and photographs them in ways that elevate the illusion to
reality. In other cases, he photographs reality, but manipulates our impression of
what we’re seeing.
One work, “July 25, 2013,” is a series of three stills from a
video taken on the titular day. “I was working with a trail crew in the eastern
Sierra Nevada, and there was a lightning storm over the Mono-Inyo Craters,” he
says.
Taking a video from the truck as it rolled along, McFarland captured
a lightning bolt. “I decided to show it as
this kind of traditional, factual representation of photographic information,
which is a contact sheet,” he says. But this particular contact sheet, of a
captured flash of sky voltage, is a deliberate misrepresentation of reality. “No one can photograph
that quickly in succession, it’s impossible.”
McFarland’s fake-nighttime photographs of scenes in San
Francisco’s Golden Gate Park were created by underexposing an image during the
daytime. Another image, “Cave,” was made by photographing the mouth of the
cavern from the outside, standing in the sunlight, but the image was printed as
a negative. “Instead of the opening swallowing light, it now becomes a source
of illumination, moving us inside the cave, looking out, as opposed to outside
looking in,” he says.
The Project Space’s walls are filled with a shifting series of
McFarland’s digital photographs, cyanotypes, Polaroid photographs, inkjet
prints on newsprint, silver gelatin prints, collages, drawings, and objects. Vitrines
in the center of the room are filled with more objects and images.
Photosensitive paper, with rough-edged chunks of glass set on them, will
develop images of unreal mountains over time.
“Normally, I make stuff that’s really polished, and this is
bonkers fun to make something that’s not necessarily so direct,” he says.
McFarland is in the space regularly, tweaking and changing
things, putting the process of discovery and evolution of the project on
display. “It’s just like having a public studio. Which is a little nerve
wracking, but at the same time, kinda great,” he
says.
The Project Space functions as one part studio, one part gallery,
where artists can hear feedback, try out different display techniques, and preview
how people interact with installations.
“One issue I’ve been having with my work is that I think it can
be really opaque, because I do go through a lot of processes to create
artifice,” McFarland says. “And so with this show, what I’m attempting to do is
reveal that process of the manufacturing of the artifice, to get people to
further question what they’re looking at, or question their relationship to the
landscape.”
McFarland’s is the fourth of seven projects in the current cycle
of month-long residencies in the Project Space. The previous work-in-progress
was “Wall + Paper” by Evelyne Leblanc-Roberge, whose work documented her correspondence
with prisoners regarding the spaces in which they live versus the spaces they
dream about, crafting a dialog about the politics of space and time.
Visual Studies Workshop director, Tate Shaw, says the aim is for
artists to use the space as a way to try something they’ve never tried before,
or develop a project further, but not to necessarily see it as a finished
thing. “It’s for artists to make things, and for us to have a dialog about them
and the process of their making,” he says.
Visual Studies Workshop will soon accept proposals for the next
cycle of Project Space residencies. Check the website for more information.
An artist talk with
McFarland will be held Wednesday, March 4, at 6 p.m. The show’s closing
reception will take place Friday, March 6, from 6 to 11 p.m.
This article appears in Feb 25 – Mar 3, 2015.
