New Terrain

By Suzanne Révy

Did you know that the earliest surviving photograph is a landscape? Taking inspiration from that early example, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s 1829  “heliograph” of the courtyard at his family’s home in France, the Worcester Art Museum presents a lively new exhibition featuring a selection of prints that examine how old and new creative processes convey meaning and metaphor in the landscape. This thought provoking and immersive show New Terrain: 21st Century Landscape Photography is on view through July 7th, 2024. 

“Buried Sunshines Burn” by Julian Charrière 2023, heliograph on highly polished steel plate, aluminum sub, courtesy of the artist and Sean Kelly, NY/LA.

Nancy Kathryn Burns, Worcester Art Museum’s Stoddard Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs, uses the landscape as her main subject for New Terrain, but the theme of the show is an exploration of the myriad ways of crafting a photograph, from the revival of historic methods, including Julian Charrière’s heliograph, to the use of artificial intelligence. In work dating exclusively from the past twenty years, the show manages the remarkable trick of engaging with history while being completely contemporary. All this while addressing the role of the museum’s collection in shaping our understanding of the medium. 

“Littoral Drift #3 (Rodeo Beach, CA)” by Meghann Riepenhoff, June 13th, 2013, cyanotype diptych on woven paper, funded by the Douglas Cox and Edward Osowdki Fund for Photography in memory of Robert A. Royce and in honor of Margaret Kent Royka, courtesy of the artist and the Worcester Art Museum.

“Eastman Kodak Azo F No. 4, expired in February 1922, processed in 2011” by Alison Rossiter (top) and “Eastman Kodak Velox, Expired 1926, processed in 2014” by Alison Rossiter (bottom). Installation photograph by Suzanne Révy.

“Cyano Collage 191” by Wu Chi-Tsung, collaged cyanotypes and Xuan paper with acrylic gel and acrylic mounted on aluminum board panel, courtesy of the artist and the Worcester Art Museum.

This intimate exhibition is loosely organized into four sections. The first looks at non-traditional applications of light sensitive materials, such as Meghann Riepenhoff’s Littoral Drift #3, where ocean waves processed the cyanotype coated paper of her camera-less diptych. Alison Rossiter’s gelatin silver paper prints were developed decades after their expiration date. Without ever being exposed to light, Rossiter’s paper showed signs of tarnished silver and the resulting shapes mimic a traditional landscape with a foreground, background and horizon line. One of the more striking works in this section is Wu Chi-Tsung’s collaged and crumpled cyanotypes mounted onto a vertical aluminum board that reference traditional Chinese paintings known as “shan shui” or mountain-water pictures. The artist creates a dialog between the Eastern tradition of visual balance through the Western inventions of aluminum and cyanotype to present this breathtaking piece. 

“A Stop Sign Flying in Blue Skies” by Elman Mansimov, 2015, archival pigment prints, courtesy of the artist and the Worcester Art Museum.

Installation view of New Terrain: 21st Century Landscape Photography featuring “Bumtown” by Stan Douglas (left). Photograph by Suzanne Révy.

The second section of the exhibit investigates technological advances in photography and includes a moving image that also employs the “shan shui” aesthetic. Yang Yongliang’s 4K single channel video is a collage of mountains, clouds, and waterfalls, but look closely, and there are urban scenes replete with traffic and pedestrians tucked throughout this mesmerizing video. We are also treated to early iterations of Artificial Intelligence text prompts by Elian Mansimov whose pixelated stop sign or flying elephants made in 2015 anticipate the shift in digital imaging away from the straightforward photograph. Highlighting the most contentious current controversy, Stan Douglas’ Bumtown seems like a film noir rendering of a bridge over water by a small neighborhood of modest homes. Although archival photographs are the basis for the piece, the final image is several generations removed, creating a complete digital rendering. It resembles a photograph or a film still with a heightened sense of surrealism in the darkness of a moonless night, but can it really be called a photograph?

“Katie’s Vacation Photo” by Tabitha Soren, 2018, archival inkjet print, Chapin Riley Fund at the Greater Worcester Community Foundation, 2021.94 © Tabitha Soren 2024

“Range: of Masters of Photography” by Penelope Umbrico, 36 individually framed pigment prints. Installation photograph by Suzanne Révy.

Artists and museums, as Burns points out, are “among the shrinking devotees to the paper format.” The third part of the show considers how photographers look to history in art. Penelope Umbrico rephotographs images in Masters of Photography, a twenty-volume series published in the mid-1970’s. Using “retro photo effects” smart phone apps, Umbrico alters well-known landscapes by such luminaries as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. The irony, of course, is that Weston and Adams took pains to avoid chemical stains, light leaks and other imperfections now applied to images with these apps. Tabitha Soren employs a traditional large-format camera to photograph an iPad in Katie’s Vacation Photo. Featuring fingerprints on the iPad’s screen, her analog photograph straddles traditional photography with the digital interface most people use to look at photographs.

“Untitled #19 (Creek and Trees)” by Dawoud Bey from the series Night Coming Tenderly, Black, gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the artist and the Worcester Art Museum.

“BB #1” by Paul Anthony Smith, inkjet print with picotage and colored pencil, mounted on museum board, gift of Jeanne McDonough. (Installation photograph by Suzanne Révy)

The last section of the exhibit embraces identity, raising questions about the perimeters of place and who may or may not occupy it. Dawoud Bey’s series Night Coming Tenderly, Black recreates the visceral experiences of enslaved people traveling cautiously in the dark through Ohio to seek their freedom, while Ileana Doble Hernandez illustrates her experience as an immigrant to this country through a broken mirror reflecting a disjointed American flag. Both artists ask, who belongs here? Who is welcome here? Similarly, Paul Anthony Smith’s Building Blocks uses architecture to simultaneously confine and protect his subjects. He employs the “picotage” technique from ceramics to build a wall on a family portrait. These tiny tears in the print conveys a sense of fragmented family memories upon close inspection, while also invoking the current political discourse around walls and borders as  viewers back up to see the whole.

“Metamorphic (4)” unique silver gelatin photogram, 2022 (left) “Cava di Ravaccione, Carrara, Italy” gelatin silver print, 2018
and “Fragments (1-3)” 3D printed Polylactic Acid, solvent based paint by Yael Eban and Matthew Gamber. Installation photograph by Suzanne Révy.

New Terrain: Landscape Photography in the 21st Century is a provocative and enveloping exhibition that explores ideas about landscape as a metaphor for memory, history and identity. It can perhaps be nicely summed up by Yael Eban and Matthew Gamber’s multi-media, three-piece work that touches on aspects of each of the exhibit’s four themes: they dipped light-sensitive gelatin silver paper into a bath of water with marbling ink, then exposed it to light, to create a unique photogram; a straight documentary photograph of an Italian marble quarry; and 3-D printed rocks adorned with a trompe l’oeil surface of gelatin silver to reveal the veins of the precious stone. Like the exhibition, these three pieces incorporate the histories of art, photography and humanities while anticipating technologies that may advance or threaten human existence. 

For more information: https://www.worcesterart.org/exhibitions/new-terrain/