Landscape Photographs














Landscape Photographs
Featuring work by Gabriel Blankenship and Brian & Gareth McClave
Curator: Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock

The Ildiko Butler Gallery
September 1, 2020—January 15, 2021
Fordham University at Lincoln Center 
113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue 
New York, NY 10023
Link

Fordham University is proud to present a new exhibition, Landscape Photographs, which brings together work from American artist Gabriel Blankenship and British artists Brian & Gareth McClave. This exhibition's straightforward title might lead one to presume images that conform to traditional expectations for landscapes—beautiful, transcendent, or sublime; moreover, accessible, and understood within the genre's history. The landscapes depicted here are undoubtedly related to the world we know, although the information is translated and parsed in potentially unfamiliar ways. Both Blankenship and the McClaves observe and take inspiration from the world around us, then process and present their information in carefully managed integers.

With Gabriel Blankenship, we see an array of ordinary suburban rooftops, clouds, powerlines, and foliage with different croppings and color schemes. On the one hand, these views are somewhat general, appearing related to a loose snapshot aesthetic filtered through video game technology. Yet, they are engineered and controlled at the smallest decision-making level, and selectively built up pixel by pixel into iconic images. A tension exists between the extreme control exercised during the image construction and the deceptively casual results. Ultimately, these scenes distill and precisely articulate some of life's quotidian details.

Brian & Gareth McClave utilize computer technology as Blankenship, though their images are abstract in a different manner. The digital slow-scan software that they developed records a picture over time and presents vertical slices of imagery. We view each image both in its entirety as well as chronologically when moving through the image bands from left to right. What might appear initially as a form of digital interference, or potential file corruption, turns out to be discreet stages in the construction of the image. The increments of a time-based narrative are visible, as well as the event in its entirety.

Roei Greenberg English Encounters

Roei Greenberg
English Encounters
Organized by Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock

The Fordham University Galleries Online
Fall 2020
Fordham University at Lincoln Center
113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue
New York, NY 10023
Link

The rural walk is a well-known English cultural practice. Though it may be civil, the act of walking itself is rooted in ideology from my cultural background; to walk the land is to know the land, and therefore suggests belonging entitlement and ownership. I begin to survey the English countryside, becoming familiar with the island’s geography, an act of mapping that refers to imperial and colonial histories.

Pertaining to Romanticism, I appropriate the visual rules of the picturesque, traditionally used to create an illusion of social and natural harmony. The dramatic light and weather conditions combined with forensic attention to details and on-site interventions intend to provoke the ambiguous feelings of seduction and alienation. Poetic and alluring yet tinged with irony, the images seek to disrupt traditional modes of representation in a place where land ownership and social hierarchy have shaped the form and perception of the landscape for centuries.

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