SuperNatural: Landscapes by Bruce Checefsky and Barry Underwood will be on view October 29, 2011 – March 4, 2012, at the Akron Art Museum in the Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell Gallery. SuperNatural joins Michelle Droll: Landslide Between a Rock and a Place as a complement to the museum’s presentation of Landscapes from the Age of Impressionism, an exhibition of more than 50 impressionist paintings. All three exhibitions open to the public on October 29, 2011.
Each artist utilizes the effects of atmospheric light in addition to outside light sources to create ephemeral moments in the landscape that give viewers the sense of discovering hidden worlds. Their inventive use of photography and light alters our perception of the landscape to reveal unseen aspects. Checefsky uses a flat-bed scanner as a field camera in his garden. Rather than placing an object on the scanner’s glass surface, he aims the scanner outward to capture images of flowers and foliage. His lush images appear to be traditional botanical studies or pastoral scenes except for the occasional scanning glitch, which blurs or distorts a part of the image.
Also an experimental filmmaker, Checefsky moves the scanner around the object he is recording so that the images have an animated quality to them. According to the artist, “They are not the frozen moment that photographs typically capture. Using a scanner feels truer to the way we see things; [the image] looks less photographic.”
Barry Underwood’s surreal photographs are a cross-pollination of static and performing art. By staging temporary light installations in the landscape, he seems to capture a secret happening—an unnatural moment in the natural world that he has chanced upon and recorded. His stunning images combining the effects of atmospheric light and his own light “interventions” spark questions about illusion, imagination and the artist’s process.
Bruce Checefsky received a Master of Fine Arts in photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art and studied at the International Center of Photography in New York City. In 2009, Checefsky was awarded a Creative Workforce Fellowship from the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture. He is also the recipient of a Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities Fellowship. In 2007, he received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Excellence Award, among numerous other honors. In 2005, Checefsky was artist-in-residence at the Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw. His works are in included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; the Brooklyn Museum, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, Japan; The Minneapolis Institute of Arts; and the Cleveland Museum of Art, among others.
Barry Underwood holds a Bachelor of Arts in photography and theater from Indiana University Northwest and a Master of Fine Arts from Cranbook Academy of Art. He has exhibited his work nationally and internationally, including gallery exhibitions in Oakland, California; Calgary, Alberta; Walnut Creek, California and Watermill, New York. Underwood was artist-in-residence at the Banff Center for the Arts in Banff, Alberta, Canada, I-Park in East Haddam, Connecticut, Headlands Center for the Arts and the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Wendover, Utah. In addition, Underwood’s work has been reviewed in numerous publications including Color Magazine, the London Times and Spectrum Magazine and featured in Real Simple Magazine. Underwood received an Individual Excellence Award grant from the Ohio Arts Council in 2008 and was awarded the 2011 Cleveland Arts Prize for Visual Arts Mid-career. He is currently an assistant professor and head of photography at the Cleveland Institute of Art. He has an upcoming exhibition at the Sculpture Center, Cleveland, Ohio.
Akron Art Museum
One South High, Akron, OH 44308
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Image: Barry Underwood, Pink 2008, Akron Art Museum