Martha Kjeseth Johnson, director Maier Museum of Art at Randolph College
The 109th Annual Exhibition
Time & Place: Water, Sky, Land
Time & Place: Water, Sky, Land presents four American artists interested in human connection to the natural world and the planet’s endangered ecosystems. Terry Evans’ photomontages of American prairies invite the viewer to commune with and contemplate the fragility of pristine grasslands. Mark Klett revisits desert landscapes first documented by 19th century American surveyors to make new works about the nature of time and history. James Balog has documented the recession of glaciers since 2007 as well as animals facing extinction and the oldest trees in the Northern Hemisphere. His images confront climate change and human modification of nature. Transdisciplinary artist Erika Blumenfeld documents meteor activity in painterly, gestural form. Like the photographers in the exhibition, Blumenfeld works closely with scientists and historians and ponders the relationship between humans and the natural environment over time, the glorious and the destructive:Mywork as a whole intends to study the notion of an embodied relationship with the cosmos—that we are, in our very chemistry, of and from the stars, an idea that although had been pondered for centuries and has been proven within my lifetime. My intent is to cultivate an expanded sense of human connectedness with the natural world and explore the emotion of wonder as a convergence of both a personal and cosmic reflection that precipitates that feeling of connection. Perhaps a daily practice of wonder engagement could be a path to empathetic response and decision making in the face of our time’s great social and environmental uncertainty.
COVER: James Balog, Vanessa and Trey With Rising Seas, Virginia Beach, Virginia, USA, 2016, pigment print on poly fabric. Courtesy of the artist.
Time & Place: Water, Sky, Land is curated by Anne Wilkes Tucker ’67. Tucker is curator emerita for the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas. During her tenure she acquired over 30,000 photographs and curated over 40 exhibitions. She was selected as “America’s Best Curator” by Time magazine in 2001. In 2019 she received the Award for Curatorship and an honorary fellowship from the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain.
Time & Place: Water, Sky, Land is made possible by the support of Mary Gray Shockey, ’69. Curated by Anne Wilkes Tucker ’67
Curator Emerita, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Co-Curator, Martha Kjeseth Johnson
James Balog, Ice Diamond #1 Jökulsárlón, Iceland, 2009 Chromogenic print on Fuji Crystal Archive paper.
Time & Place: Water, Sky, Land D
uring their sustained careers, the five artists in this exhibition — James Balog, Erika Blumenfeld, Mark Klett, Byron Wolfe, and Terry Evans — have chosen to look through camera lenses at segments of land, sky, and water, seeking to make substantive and compelling pictures that will engage audiences. Their decisions may be quickly made, but these are not snapshots. They are not in any particular place by chance. Each photographer has identified something they want to see freshly in their minds and on site, and then preserve. The complexities of their photographs involve diverse technologies, different seasons and times of day during which they intentionally work, their individual knowledge about each place’s history and evolution, the artistic traditions that precede them, and finally, and most critically, the aesthetic inquiries that drive their practice of art. All their prior work has led them to these resulting pictures. Erika Blumenfeld’s works are complex in similar ways, but her projects are as likely to involve photography in a laboratory or an observatory as in the field. She has focused on defining the properties of light and the paths of asteroids, which have landed on the moon or are still moving through space. Finally, all five artists share an interest in human connections to the natural world and in the planet’s endangered ecosystems. From the rich bodies of work each artist has created, only a limited number could be included in the exhibition. When selecting particular works, the curators focused on the relationship of time and place as primary concepts embodied in their pictures, a relationship that shifted in presentation as their careers evolved. As Mark Klett notes, it is often, “not the place, but our perceptions that change.”
James Balog’s images vividly convey time passing, but with great variations in the length of time and the changing conditions in revisited places. He has photographed protected trees that have lived for centuries, fires and hurricanes churning with increasing intensity and destructive power, and animals that were being driven to extinction by modernity, some becoming extinct as he finished the project. His most sustained and comprehensive endeavors survey the worldwide phenomena and the consequences of vanishing ice. Traveling to most of the world’s major glaciers, he has recorded surface pools on melting glaciers as well as melt pools that became rivers or crevices piercing glacial ice down into the fragile permafrost. His film Chasing Ice was a better medium to convey the sound and violent motion of an iceberg the size of a skyscraper as it calved into the sea. He photographed ice cores drilled from the Greenland ice sheet that contain 15,000-year-old fossilized air bubbles. Scientists analyze the CO2 levels in the bubbles, and then, the CO2 in the glacier’s surface ice to provide more evidence that current levels of carbon are climbing rapidly above what was normal for hundreds of thousands of years. Next, Balog tracked the impact of melting ice on rising sea levels throughout Virginia’s Atlantic shores. Tangier Island is disappearing. Naval Station Norfolk, the world’s largest naval base, is at risk. Homes along the shores of Chesapeake Bay and
Terry Evans cherishes returning to the prairies of her childhood, which were formed over 9,000 years ago following the retreat of the great glaciers. A few prairies exist that were never plowed and are protected from pedestrian and vehicular interventions by private or government ownership, but there are no standardized policies set by other owners to prevent disruption of their profound botanical complexity.
in Norfolk Beach are flooding on sunny days. Balog’s picture Vanessa and Trey with Rising Seas, Virginia Beach, Virginia 2016 portends a haunting prediction. The boy’s anxiety is palpable; the mother stands braced in water at current levels. But where will the water levels be when her son is her age?
Only fifteen percent of a plant on a virgin prairie is visible above ground; the other eighty-five percent lies below the surface, where roots can extend 15 to 20 feet. From her first visit, over forty years ago, Evans was fascinated that she could only see a fraction of the plants’ intertwined structures in the area around her feet. With extended time, she learned many of the plants’ poetic names: silverleaf scurfpea, nodding lady’s tresses, and green antelopehorn. “I felt embarrassed when I came across one whose name I’d forgotten or hadn’t yet learned,” she wrote. “It was like slighting a friend.” While photographing during different seasons in virgin and other familiar prairies, she learned to recognize their cyclical systems of growth based on the diversity and the self-renewal of perennial plants. She has published five books of her photographs of prairies. For Evans’ newest series, not all the fields have virgin status. She walks, studies, and photographs, collecting images, but no longer for single image presentations. These extended time visits are presented as large-scale collages of the different views made at each site. For Night, April 2020, Evans photographed throughout the pandemic’s first April from dusk, when the sun’s reflections of pink light appear on the horizon, to the pitch darkness of prairie nights. Night is also a recorded memory of walks through prairie grass with her husband Sam. Later, back home in Chicago, she created a montage of the images vertically rising from dusk to clear indigo (which is how the camera reads the sky’s color just before night), then she digitally stitched the images together, grateful to the meteorite that animated the sky one night that month. Balog and Evans have both made multiple-image compositions of venerable trees. Here too, the final works were created in computers which stitched together the selected exposures. Balog’s project required almost an hour to climb the Giant Sequoia (“Stagg”) in Camp Nelson, California and four more hours to lower himself in a specially designed harness, stopping every fifteen feet to pan across the tree with his digital camera. Stagg is estimated to be 3000 years old, is 243 feet tall, and its close proximity to other sequoia, makes it extremely difficult to photograph. After Balog’s decent, selections from the 451 photographs taken that day were composed to complete the mosaic of the whole tree.
Instead of three images made in different years and organized in a chronologically-ordered horizontal display, Klett and Wolfe inserted into their own contemporary color panorama of Pyramid Lake a digital image of a segment of Timothy O’Sullivan’s 1867 albumen print of a vertical rock island in the lake. The shoreline relative to this free-standing outcropping is different in the 1867, 1979 and 2000 views because the water level of the lake has changed. Also, the photographers have inserted themselves into the third view scenes, and they have abandoned the traditional rectangular format. Their selfinsertions are a reminder that these pictures were conceived and executed through personal vision. Wolfe calls the insertions “mash-ups of different times, experiences and ways of looking at the place… It looks like we had the intention of revealing something about the medium, but that’s not the driving question behind what we’re doing. It’s more about being curious, having fun, and posing questions.”
Evans also used multiple exposures to photograph one of Chicago’s oldest trees, a burr oak, known for its gangly, curving limbs that span 90 feet. Located on park land converted to an island surrounded by two lagoons for the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 by Frederick Law Olmsted, the “father of American landscape architecture.” The tree is in a popular place to walk, as can be seen in one of the composite images. Unlike Balog, Evans had room to photograph during April and May, 2019, starting when the tree was still without leaves and continued with the yellow-green sprouts of early spring to the dark green leaves of summer. Spring, Burr Oak, April-May, 2019 extends time within the picture, revealing a change in seasons while Night, April 2020 preserved a collection of nights without light pollution.
For their work Details from the view at Point Sublime on the north rim of the Grand Canyon, based on the panoramic drawing by William Holmes (1882) they reversed the placement. Now, the older view of the Grand Canyon drawn by William Holmes is the panorama into which they insert modern views. During two days in 2007 they made almost 1000 images at Point Sublime while consulting copies of Holmes’ meticulous drawings. Once back in their respective states, they studied their pictures and exchanged digital files, finally deciding that their overlays would be of transient moments in contrast to Holmes’ thorough, still-accurate renditions. Their single image color inserts shift the time of day,
Of the five photographers, Mark Klett has delved most consciously into time as a primary component in his projects. From the Rephotographic Survey Project, 1977-79, to the publication of his retrospective monograph, Seeing Time: Forty Years of Photographs in 2020, the passage of time has been an embedded concept in most of his projects. Concurrent with his increasing attention to the properties of time is his awareness of physical changes in topography impacted by human intervention, which is also connected to the passage of time in ways more complicated than might seem obvious. Klett’s photographs in this exhibition are from two series: Third View, 1997-2000, and Reconstructing the View, 2007-2010, both of which were collaborations with Byron Wolfe. For the project Third View, Wolfe worked with Klett on three of the images exhibited here and Mark Marshall on another. Klett and his graduate students returned to places photographed twenty years earlier by Klett for the series Second View, but using new technologies and changed perspectives for Third View in order to re-experience these historic places.
Erika Blumenfeld has studied light in many forms, such as the living light of bioluminescent organisms as she gently propelled them through an agitation chamber in a laboratory, and light leaks captured on Polaroid film through a lensless 19th century double-bellows camera. She has photographed the natural phenomena of light over lunar cycles, solstices and equinoxes. Light, she observes, is “one of the great wonders of our universe,” and she strives “to catch light and to know something of its essence.” For Blumenfeld, “Wonder is the fulcrum point of art and science, is at the heart of my research and work, and drives me to seek answers to the endless questions that arise from engaging in a direct experience with our phenomenal world.” Since 2011, Erika has activated the long-held knowledge, both scientific and traditional, that we are deeply connected to the universe across its 13.8 billion years—and the profound poetry in knowing that the material comprising our bodies shares cosmic origins with the material comprising our solar system and beyond. In 2013, by asking the question “Might it be possible to hold a rock in one’s hand that told the story of the whole cosmos?” Blumenfeld initiated at NASA the idea for the project Astromaterials 3D: to make extraterrestrial samples available virtually through interactive research-grade 3D models. She led an interdisciplinary team which NASA termed “a dynamic intersection of art, science, and technology.”
Martha Johnson and I are grateful to these artists for allowing us to exhibit their inventive and engaging works together in our exhibition Time & Place: Water, Sky, Land, generating myriad rich contemporary dialogues.
Anne Wilkes Tucker
weather, vegetation, and changes in sunlight as it strikes the weathered rock’s striations. As with Panorama from O’Sullivan’s “Pyramid Lake” camera position, their changes in Point Sublime highlight that change is relative to time and time is an entity which exists only in relation to other entities, such as change.
The web platform was launched in December 2020. In 2017, working independently with NASA’s All Sky Fireball Network, Blumenfeld downloaded each available video made between June 2017 and June 2018. She has collected data for more than 5,763 meteor events, selecting one video from each event that classifies as a fireball (a shooting star as bright as or brighter than Venus). Thus far, for the project Encyclopedia of Trajectories, she has created over one thousand gestural representations of each fireball’s “unique luminous mark across the night sky,” carefully matching the variables, including arc, width and length, and position in the sky. She paints each trajectory on watercolor paper with a single, graceful stroke using 23.75-karat gold, which she selected because of its celestial origins as the byproduct of neutron star collisions. Gold arrived on earth aboard meteors during the planet’s early formation.
TERRY EVANS was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and spent most of her adult life in Salina before moving to Chicago. The heart of her photographic work emerges from a deep and informed concentration on America’s prairies that began more than forty years ago, when she photographed the Fent prairie, an 80-acre virgin site near Salina. She explored Fent and other preserved prairies for the next eight years, which introduced her to the wondrous balance of an undisturbed ecosystem that has informed her work to date. In the series Ancient Prairies, she now revisits prairie remnants. She returned to the Fent in late May, 2018, to photograph its intricate botanical complexity after having photographed the effects of fracking in North Dakota and petcoke pollution in Southern Chicago, both of which show human disregard for land and its people. “I’m deeply disturbed by our seeming inability to confront the current and impending disasters of intensive fossil fuel overuse,” she wrote, as well as “the climate change our lives are provoking. This work is about remembering the wisdom and beauty of intact prairies. It is about SEEING them. These prairies would not exist without human care, and Ancient Prairies serves as a tribute to the kinship between humans and nature.” Evans has published seven monographs, exhibited widely, and received numerous honors and awards, including an Anonymous Was A Woman Fellowship (2006), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1996) and a Mid-America Arts Alliance/National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1983).
Terry Evans (b. 1944, USA)
Terry Evans, A Small Central Illinois Prairie, 2018, Inkjet print on fiber/rag. Courtesy of the artist and Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago.
Terry Evans, Night, April, 2020, Inkjet print on fiber/rag. Courtesy of the artist and Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago.
Terry Evans, Spring Burr Oak, April-May, 2019, Inkjet print on fiber/rag. Courtesy of the artist and Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago.
A FORMER GEOLOGIST TURNED PHOTOGRAPHER, Mark
Klett’s photographic interests were redirected when he moved to the American west to photograph the same mountain ranges and deserts initially photographed by the nineteenth-century photographers assigned to one of the four different United States Geological Surveys. Klett notes that learning to collaborate with a team of other photographers in this first major photographic project — Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project (1977-1979) — had “an early and profound effect on my trajectory as an artist.” Over four decades—and in half of his eighteen books—alliances with photographers, essayists, poets, scientists, and historians have enriched his projects, bringing specific areas of deep knowledge and fresh perspectives that were different than Klett’s own areas of expertise. The collaborations enhanced his understanding of the territories that he photographed. Consequently, while his photographs are principally driven by artistic goals, they have also become increasingly layered with complexity gleaned from colleagues and research.
BYRON WOLFE began working with Klett as a graduate student during the project Third Views, Second Sights (2004) and advanced into a long-term partnership that has lasted over twenty years. Wolfe’s knowledge of evolving photographic technologies enabled various mutually-developed new forms of picture making, including large-scale panoramic photographs that digitally incorporate multiple images taken decades, even a century, before the contemporary images primarily taken by Klett. Byron Wolfe is Professor and Photography Program Director at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Philadelphia. He has published one monograph and five books with collaborators and has received the Santa Fe Prize for Photograph and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Mark Klett Byron Wolf (b. 1952, USA) (b. 1967, USA)
Klett lives in Tempe, Arizona where he is Regents’ Professor of Art and Distinguished Sustainability Scholar at Arizona State University. His work has been exhibited and published in the United States and internationally and he has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Japan/US Friendship Commission, among others.
Byron Wolfe and Mark Klett for the Third View project, 2000. Panorama showing W.H. Jackson’s “Old Faithful” camera position
Inset: Timothy O’Sullivan, 1872. Brown’s Park from Entrance to Canyon of Lodore, southern Wyoming. Inkjet photograph. Courtesy of the artist.
Inset: William Henry Jackson, 1878. Old Faithful in eruption. Inkjet photograph. Courtesy of the artist.
Mark Klett, Panorama from O’Sullivan’s “Entrance to Canyon of Lodore.”
Byron Wolfe and Mark Klett for the Third View project, 2000. Panorama from O’Sullivan’s “Pyramid Lake” camera position
Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe, 2007. Details from the view at Point Sublime on the north rim of the Grand Canyon, based on the panoramic drawing by William Holmes (1882). William Henry Holmes, 1882. Sheets XV, XVI, XVII. Panorama of Point Sublime. From Clarence Dutton, Atlas to Accompany the Monograph on the Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon District. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress). Inkjet photograph. Courtesy of the artist.
Inset: Timothy O’Sullivan, 1867. Rock formations, Pyramid Lake, Nev. Inkjet photograph. Courtesy of the artist.
Erika Blumenfeld (b. 1971, USA)
ERIKA BLUMENFELD is a transdisciplinary artist whose practice is motivated by the wonder of natural phenomena and the relationship between nature and culture. Driven by a passion to trace the evidence and stories of connections across the cosmos, her artistic inquires have led her to examine a range of subjects including astronomy, geology, planetary science, ecology, the environment, anthropogenic climate disruption, and natural night sky preservation, as well as light in its many forms. Blumenfeld has often worked in collaboration with scientists and research institutions, including NASA, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, McDonald Observatory, and the South African National Antarctic Program. Her non-traditional research-based practice has explored the subtle shifts in lunar and solar light, the prismatic landscape of Antarctica, the starry night sky, the glow of marine bioluminescence, and the intricate mineralogical structure of astro materials and trajectories of shooting stars. The photo and video-based works, installations, paintings, drawings, sculptures—and the writing that results—are the artifacts that express her inquiries’ reflections. Blumenfeld is the recipient of many awards, including Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Artist-in-Residence (2018); NASA ROSES PDART Grant (2016-2019); Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship at the National Museum of Natural History (2015); Artist-in-residence with ITASC Research Team, SANAE Research Base, Antarctica (2009); and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2008).
Erika Blumenfeld, Encyclopedia of Trajectories, 2017 (20 framed works on paper), 23.75 karat gold, gum arabic on paper. Courtesy of the artist.
He has published eight monographs and won numerous awards and honors, including the Royal Photographic Society Hood Medal, the Heinz Award, Julie Walters Prize for Global Environmental Activism, and the American Geophysical Union Presidential Citation for Science and Society.
James Balog (b. 1952, USA)
FOR FORTY YEARS, James Balog has photographed the beauty of our natural resources and their destruction. He has focused on the collisions of humans and the environment as well as naturally occurring devastation caused by hurricanes, floods, and wildfires. He has pushed aesthetic boundaries to create simultaneously engaging and disquieting individual photographs, coherent series, and award-winning films to stimulate public awareness and mobilize action on behalf of the earth and its populations. Research, which includes collaboration with scholars and environmental specialists, informs his vision, but, Balog insists, “I do not research first and shoot later. I learn of a situation …, then go on multi-year quests, learning as I go, to discover how I can both symbolically and literally express what I see.” As Balog became increasingly aware of unprecedented glacial melting, he founded the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS) through which time-lapse cameras captured glacial retreat without requiring human presence. He and his team custom-made equipment to withstand severe wind conditions and temperatures down to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit. By 2007, twenty-five cameras powered by solar panels and batteries were mounted on rock walls above sixteen glaciers’ termini. Set in remote sites, primarily in the Northern Hemisphere, the cameras photographed every hour or half-hour during daylight, year-round, creating millions of images. Thus, EIS became an invaluable provider of data and visual evidence of climate and environmental change. The data, some of which has been incorporated into a time-lapse video, brought invitations to speak at the United Nations Climate Change Conferences in Copenhagen (2009) and Paris (2015), The American Geophysical Union (2013) and the People’s Climate March, Washington DC (2017) among other prestigious venues.
James Balog, Cajun Fisherman with Oiled Net After Gulf Oil Spill, Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, USA, 2010, pigment print on poly fabric. Courtesy of the artist.
James Balog, Disko Bay (triptych), Greenland, 2019, pigment print on poly fabric. Courtesy of the artist.
James Balog, Controlled Burn #6, Fort Providence, Northwest Territories, Canada, 2015, pigment print on poly fabric. Courtesy of the artist.
Panorama from O’Sullivan’s “Pyramid Lake” camera position. Inset: Timothy O’Sullivan, 1867. Rock formations, Pyramid Lake, Nev. Inkjet photograph Mark Klett and Mike Marshall for the Third View project, 2000. Balanced Rock off Route 89A near Vermillion Cliffs, AZ.
Panorama from O’Sullivan’s “Entrance to Canyon of Lodore.”
109TH
Panorama showing W.H. Jackson’s “Old Faithful” camera position
Inset: Timothy O’Sullivan, 1872. Brown’s Park from Entrance to Canyon of Lodore, southern Wyoming. Inkjet photograph ANNUAL EXHIBITION
MARK KLETT Byron Wolfe and Mark Klett for the Third View project, 2000.
CHECKLIST OF EXHIBITION Artists and their works are listed alphabetically. Where media and dimensions are the same for all works by an artist, they are listed before the titles. For dimensions, height precedes width.
TERRY EVANS A Small Central Illinois Prairie, 2018 Inkjet print on fiber/rag Spring Burr Oak, April-May, 2019 Inkjet print on fiber/rag Night, April, 2020 Inkjet print on fiber/rag Courtesy of the artist and Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago.
Inset: William Bell, ca. 1872. Perched Rock (Rocker Creek). Inkjet photograph (Courtesy of the artist) Courtesy of the artist.
Inset: William Henry Jackson, 1878. Old Faithful in eruption Inkjet photograph Byron Wolfe and Mark Klett for the Third View Project, 2000.
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Time & Place: Water, Sky, Land
Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe, 2007. Details from the view at Point Sublime on the north rim of the Grand Canyon, based on the panoramic drawing by William Holmes (1882). William Henry Holmes, 1882. Sheets XV, XVI, XVII. Panorama of Point Sublime. From Clarence Dutton, Atlas to Accompany the Monograph on the Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon District. (Courtesy of the Library of ByronInkjetCongress)photographWolfeandMark Klett for the Third View project, 2000.
Giant Sequoia (“Stagg”), Camp Nelson, California, USA, 2001 Chromogenic print on Fuji Crystal Archive paper
ERIKA
Mendenhall Iceberg #17, Mendenhall Glacier, Alaska, USA, Chromogenic2010print on Fuji Crystal Archive paper
Catalogue design by Janet Fletcher, Studio 5 Graphics, Lynchburg, Virginia. BLUMENFELD Encyclopedia of Trajectories, 2017 (20 framed works on paper) 23.75 karat gold, gum arabic on paper
Vanessa and Trey with Rising Seas, Virginia Beach, Virginia, USA, 2016 Pigment print on poly fabric Courtesy of the artist.
Courtesy of the artist. JAMES BALOG Disko Bay (triptych), Greenland, 2019 pigment print on poly fabric Coral Reef (Carl’s Hill) from Fifteen Feet to Seventy Feet, Bonaire, 2006 pigment print on poly fabric Cajun Fisherman with Oiled Net After Gulf Oil Spill, Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, USA, pigment2010 print on poly fabric Controlled Burn #6, Fort Providence, Northwest Territories, Canada, 2015 pigment print on poly fabric Iceberg in Waves, Iceland, 2008 Chromogenic print on Fuji Crystal Archive paper Ice Diamond #1 Jökulsárlón, Iceland, 2009 Chromogenic print on Fuji Crystal Archive paper
