TERRY EVANS – THE INHABITED PRAIRIE

Inhabited Prairie, an exhibition of vintage black and white aerial photographs taken by Terry Evans between 1990 and 1994, which explore the complexities and contradictions in America’s heartland, specifically the artist’s local landscape in her native Kansas. This particular region has a deep and varied history of use. For instance, Smoky Hill Weapons Range, the nation’s largest Air National Guard bombing site, is contained within fertile fields and agro-industrial lands, and is only a short distance from the Tallgrass Prairie Natural Preserve, the last uncultivated tallgrass prairie ecosystem in North America.

Having photographed the ecology of the prairie floor from ground level for several years, Evans determined that the story of the land was incomplete without a macroscopic perspective of what she described as the “disturbed, cultivated, militarized” prairie.

In 1990, Evans began taking flights in a 25-mile radius around her home in Salina, Kansas, cataloguing the farms, flooded fields, cemeteries, ancient Indian village sites, highways, train tracks, bridges, military sites, cattle ranches and industrial gravel pits comprising the land below. Flying at 700 to 1000 feet, Evans could read specific pieces of visual information on the ground, without the entire landscape veering into abstraction. This distinction is critical to Evans’ practice, and it allowed for her unflinching look at the relationship between human intervention and the natural prairie. As Evans writes: “The thing I love the most was learning to read the landscape history from the air. I felt I was acquiring a sort of visual literacy of the ground. It was about reading the clues that told me whether or not the ground had ever been plowed, where the cemeteries were, what part was military, and what the history of all those markings meant.”

Exhibition runs through till July 3rd, 2013

Yancey Richardson Gallery
535 West 22nd Street 3rd floor
New York
NY
10011

www.yanceyrichardson.com

RANKIN – ALIVE: IN THE FACE OF DEATH

Featuring more than 70 images, in ‘Alive: In The Face of Death’, photographer Rankin sets out to explore and challenge our perceptions of death. Through his lens, the stories of those touched by death are revealed.
They include people living with a terminal illness, those who have faced death and survived, and those who work within the death industry.
One portrait is of 48-year-old Mum, Sandra, who was diagnosed with breast cancer eight years ago. In Rankin’s image of her, Sandra feels she is displaying her ‘inner warrior’ as she battles her condition.

Rankin’s own response to the subject is reflected in a series of self-portraits and in his ‘life masks’. These include images of living stars such as Jarvis Cocker, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Joanna Lumley along with those who have passed away such as Marlon Brando and Peter Cushing.

Exhibition runs through till September 15th, 2013

Walker Art Gallery
William Brown Street
Liverpool
L3 8EL

liverpoolmuseums.org.uk