IN THE MAIN AND CENTER GALLERIES

Wonderland: Landscape Photographs by Mary Lang

May 3-28, 2017
Opening Reception: Friday, May 5, 2017, 5:30-8:00 pm
Q&A with Mary Lang: Thursday, May 25, 2017, 6:00-8:00 pm

Mary Lang
Columbia Gorge Model Railroad Club, Portland, OR, archival pigment print, 20 x 30 inches, 2016.
Mary Lang
Tracks and Trails, Balboa Park Model Railroad Museum, San Diego, CA, archival pigment print, 20 x 20 inches, 2016.
Mary Lang
Vashon Island, WA, archival pigment print, 20 x 30 inches, 2016.
Mary Lang
United flight 1043 between Boston and San Francisco, archival pigment print, 20 x 30 inches, 2015.
Mary Lang

Near Moulton Falls, WA, archival pigment print, 20 x 30 inches, 2015.

Press Release
Artist Page
"This one but not that one: Perception, Editing, and Meaning." Kingston Blog, Thinking About Art Out Loud, May 17, 2017.

Wonderland: Landscape Photographs by Mary Lang continue Lang's exploration of the elemental nature of the phenomenal world. For Lang, landscape is a way of experiencing space. A meandering path or the shape of a hill, where the horizon falls defining the relationship between earth, sky, and water, draws one into the space. In her work there is both emptiness and presence, the mark of humans on the land but very few humans within the frame. The photographs in Wonderland incorporate both meanings of "wonder"; amazement and uncertainty. Some of these landscapes are not real, but are model railroad environments. The photographs of models alongside real landscapes create an uncertainty. Lang's work has long been informed by her meditation practice and the Buddhist teachings that the world we perceive is like an illusion, as vivid as a dream but just as insubstantial. Of her work Lang says, "These images point at the possibility that we could lift the veil of illusion on our full-size worlds, the ones that we solidify and inhabit day to day, the portable stage sets that convince us that our truth is the truth, and not something we constructed as our own model version of the world."