Washington DC – Hemphill opens Anne Rowland on Saturday, April 9, 2011, with a public reception from 6:30 - 8:30pm. The exhibition will remain on view through June 4, 2011.

That tomato in your salad did not appear immaculately. Every agricultural product cultivated through hard work and good luck is a grand victory that also negatively impacts the environment. For those of us sensitive to the natural environment, there is a kind of sadness that accompanies any appraisal of farmland. Yet in those open pastures, towering rows of corn and slowly grazing cows, we encounter an open border to nature unencumbered, wilderness pressing at our ambitious sense of order. Anne Rowland’s complex photographic engagement with the farmland around her home in rural Virginia springs from an instinctual feeling for nature and the inherent melancholy of our intrusion upon it. In her collection and mending together of visual data, Rowland points to a place in the human brain that desires to commune with and care for the wilderness. Genetic science has not identified the complex ribbon of DNA that gives us an appreciation of nature, and no doubt it will remain elusive for some time. Nevertheless, Rowland’s photographs are a testament to its irrepressible existence.

Anne Rowland’s current method of production utilizes the GigaPan, a programmable robotic camera mount, similar to the device attached to the Mars Lunar Rover. The GigaPan allows Rowland to snap hundreds of shots in a short period of time. The pictures are then digitally stitched together to produce landscape images with immense detail. Her intentional misuse of the GigaPan allows for optical “mistakes” which interrupt the predictability of her images. Evidence of movement, distortions of space, and inconsistencies in continuity, focus and depth all enhance the overall effect of the end product.

Anne Rowland received a BFA from the joint program at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, and Tufts University, Medford, MA, with additional studies at the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship (1985). She has exhibited nationally at such institutions as the Washington Center for Photography, Washington, DC, the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, and the Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX. Rowland currently splits her time between Bluemont, VA, and New York City.

GALLERY HOURS
Tuesday–Saturday, 10:00am–5:00pm, and by appointment

IMAGES ARE AVAILABLE FOR REPRODUCTION.