Sean McFarland

Eli Ridgway Gallery is pleased to present Viewshed, a solo exhibition by Sean McFarland. Through a disciplined studio practice using unconventional modes of photography, McFarland investigates the not-so-often-seen vantage points of the Western landscape. The exhibition gathers color photographs, black-and-white Polaroids, and graphite drawings into a seemingly humble presentation that unfolds into monumental imagery, challenging how we understand both the environment and the photographic medium.

At the center of the show is McFarland's Dark Pictures — nearly black C-prints whose surfaces slowly dissipate as fragments of light reveal dense canopies of foliage opening onto uncharted voids. Most of these landscapes exist because of human conservation: city parks, open spaces, and gardens maintained as the representation of the natural. Like the word landscape, a viewshed is a screen that conceals what one does not want the eye to see. Alongside the photographs are the modest black-and-white Polaroids of Pictures of the Earth and a group of new graphite-on-paper drawings, each questioning how we picture, possess, and trust the land.