Crouched in the broken shadow with the sun at his back and holding the trap at eyelevel against the morning sky he looked to be truing some older, some subtler instrument. Astrolabe or sextant. Like a man bent at fixing himself someway in the world. Bent on trying by arc or chord the space between his being and the world that was. If there be such space. If it be knowable.

—Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

These images are from a collaborative exhibition (and accompanying catalog), "If There Be Such Space", with Mike Lundgren, at the University of Virginia, January - February 2012.

Mike and I met as graduate students in the photography program at Arizona State University, and we quickly bonded over a love for the landscape and a desire to find new ways to express an active experience of place. This exhibition and catalog are our attempt to understand what still holds our visions together—to see if a core concern could be identified after a decade of independent exploration. We wondered if we could create an exhibition out of our recent, independently created work that would function as a whole—not just two artists’ work sharing the same space. The result is, we hope, a sequence of images that gives space to our individual visions, while revealing a larger, shared understanding of the experience of landscape.

The exhibition catolog accompanying the show has an excellent essay by Josh Wallaert.  The essay and work from the show are featured at Places [at] Design Observer.

Thanks to William Wylie at UVA for his support and help with this show.

Prints are archival pigment prints or silver-gelatin prints, sized between 24" x 30" and 32" x 40". Mike Lundgren's images are labeled, all others by Aaron Rothman.

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