Mary Miss, Untitled, 1996
'Mary Miss: Landscape in Photo/Drawings' is an exhibition of photo-collages by the renowned sculptor and public artist currently at Senior & Shopmaker Gallery, New York. Spanning the fields of architecture, landscape design, sculpture, and installation art, Miss's work challenges conventional ways of seeing the landscape we inhabit. Her public commissions, which range from altered topographic landscapes to architectural constructions, occupy sites as diverse as New York City's Hudson River waterfront and underground subway, a wetland in Iowa, and a forest in Finland.
An important aspect of Miss's work is her photo/drawings: collages in which several photographic views of a single structure or site are spliced together to form an altered whole. Throughout her domestic travels, Miss has always photographed unusual sites and temporary structures in the American landscape including canals, mine-heads, fences, and towers. Many of these pictures inform a significant part of her public sculpture projects. It was in 1990, after an artist-residency at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, that Miss began layering her photographs, creating collages whose outer edges formed irregular contours. As their emphasis on light and abstract pattern attests, the photo/drawing conveys the experience of a particular space rather than strict documentation. The re-invention of existing structures and the observation of a site from different perspectives link the photo/drawings with the concerns of her three-dimensional projects. They also provide an emotional reference and memory of place that resonates in her large outdoor works.
Although correspondences exist between Miss's photo/drawings and the photographs of Gordon Matta-Clark, Jan Dibbets, and Robert Smithson, each artist approaches landscape differently. For Miss, the photo/drawings illustrate an overriding theme that exists in all of her sitework: the conjunction between the built and the natural landscape.
In 2004 a fully-illustrated monograph on Mary Miss was published by Princeton Architectural Press with essays by Daniel Abramson, Joseph Giovannini, and Eleanor Heartney. Current projects include a permanent tree-topped walkway for the Indianapolis Museum of Art, a layered pond for the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, and a master plan for a 1,000 acre public park in Irvine, California, in collaboration with landscape architect Ken Smith and architect Enrique Norten.
Untitled (Houston Bleachers), 1996
Untitled (Queens-FMCP), 1988
MARY MISS: LANDSCAPE IN PHOTO/DRAWINGS, to 22 Nov, 2006
Senior & Shopmaker Gallery
21 East 26th Street
New York, NY 10010
T: +1 212 213 6767
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