Unnatural Formations: Three Contemporary Photographers

Tuesday, April 3 through Saturday, June 30, 2012
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 12 – 6 pm, 3rd Floor Galleries
Free

The American-Scandinavian Foundation celebrates the 100th anniversary of its Fellowship program with an exhibition featuring the work of three recent grant recipients -- Stephen Hilyard, Simen Johan, and Lydia Anne McCarthy – who have emerged as innovators in the field of contemporary landscape photography. The exhibition offers a unique look at hybrid photographs where disparate and sometimes dissonant images are woven together to create new, hypothetical landscapes.

The exhibition explores the ways in which the photographers access, engage, and even exploit unique elements of Nordic terrain and climate for expressive effect. Through various techniques of photographic manipulation, the artists construct landscapes at once familiar and alien, natural and artificial, ultimately calling into question perceptions of reality and artifice.

The photographs, taken from discrete series of work originating out of the respective artists’ ASF Fellowship experiences, underscore the importance of international study to the arts. The ASF Fellowship Program is the Foundation’s longest-standing commitment to cultural and educational exchange and, over the last 100 years, has awarded over 5,500 fellowships and grants to Americans and Scandinavians.