SEAN McFARLAND: Untitled (1948 - 2012)
Installation View
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SEAN McFARLAND: Untitled (1948 - 2012)
Gallery Project Space
June 30 - August 11, 2012
Opening Reception Saturday June 30th, 4:00 - 7:00pm
Nature is a mediated experience, seen more in pictures and on screens, from scenic viewpoints off the highway, than in person. Romantic images of mountains, forests and seascapes are so meticulously edited for narrative consumption that what appears on postcards is only merely suggestive of the landscape's veritable form. With this in mind, Sean McFarland presents Untitled (1948-2012), a collection of photographs and drawings presenting nature as literal artifice. Produced from the abstraction of man-made materials and elements from the natural world, the pictures of Untitled (1948-2012) highlight the continual blurring of lines between unbiased documentation and a sentimental mythologizing of terrain. McFarland manually produces compositions that imitate commonly seen tropes of landscape photography, critically examining the contemporary condition that many representations of the earth are more accurately "likenesses" of the earth.
Born in Southern California, McFarland currently lives and works in San Francisco. McFarland earned his under graduate degree from Humboldt State University, and his MFA from California College of the Arts. McFarland's has received several prestigious awards, recently including the 2011 Eureka Fellowship from The Fleishhacker Foundation, an invitation to the 2011 Bay Area Now: 6 triennial exhibition at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the 2009 Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers. McFarland's work has exhibited internationally over the past ten years and has been collected by several public and private collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Whitney Museum of American Art Library, the Oakland Museum, Humboldt State University, University of California Davis and Genentech.
Three works from McFarland's series, Dark Pictures, are currently on view in the permanent collections galleries of the SFMOMA as part of the Selected Histories exhibition.
