Sean McFarland
Eli Ridgway Gallery is pleased to present Untitled (1948–2012), an exhibition of new photographic and cameraless works by Sean McFarland. Working across Polaroid, cyanotype, silver gelatin print and graphite, McFarland makes intimate black-and-white images of landscape — and of the history of landscape pictures — that hover between document and invention.
Many of the works look like straightforward landscape photography but are not: a grid of moons is a set of cyanotype photograms of bottle caps; a mountain against a black sky is a photogram of chipped ballistics glass; a dark diptych pairs the upward slope of a mountain with an unexposed black Polaroid. Through substitution and sleight of hand, McFarland turns the viewer's assumptions about photographic truth upon their head while preserving the quiet, sublime beauty of the genre he draws on.
“Sitting in an intimate room in Eli Ridgway Gallery, Sean McFarland's loosely gridded installation of fifteen black and white images at first appears as rather straightforward landscape photography.”