"New and Selected"
By Jeffrey McMullen

On display Dec. 16, 2011 thru Jan. 31, 2012

Artist's Statement:

New and Selected

The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms….But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts….
-R.W. Emerson

Just as landscape photography has been expressed in many forms, from the romantic and picturesque to the documentary and the abstract, so does the landscape itself in many ways express the culture that inhabits it, from the sublime in nature left untouched to the pastoral of Emerson’s rolling New England farmland, to the polemical of nature endangered or exploited.

The artist interacts subjectively with the environment, as William Jackson, Carlton Watkins and Ansel Adams were inspired by western wilderness, their photographs in turn inspiring the nation to protect Yellowstone, Yosemite and Kings Canyon as national parks; and as Richard Misrach and Lee Friedlander gave us new expressive ways of seeing landscape in their images of the Southwest, hopefully leading us to examine our own relationship with the environment.

These selections represent various projects, including: Allegany County candidate sites for nuclear waste disposal; Seneca Indian lands exposed 30 years after the tragic removal and flooding for the Kinzua Reservoir; a search for the subject location of Charles Burchfield’s painting, “March Sunlight”; endangered native orchids of the northeast; and a study of New York’s “North Coast.”

- Jeffrey McMullen