Curator / Derrick Jefferies

After-Sought

Mary Goodwin
Patrick Craig Manning
Lanning Shields

February 4–28, 2009

It is impossible to pioneer the American landscape. Crossed by lines of travel, communication and inhabitation, any notion of discovery lies within our capacity to see anew. After-Sought brings you three artists whose imagery re-approaches these charted territories through time, memory and the underscoring of our own cultural marks on the landscape.

Phasing from night to day, Patrick Manning's 40 days randomly couples two-channel videos of the Albuquerque sky in a time-lapsed video installation. The result is a gleeful and alien return to lying on one's back and simply looking up. Conversely, Mary Goodwin's Site Line series is a panoptic view, directing a 'radical transport' to a location where geography and personal change are inseparable. Their aberrant bulging centers dominate attention over their flanking, often conventionally sought after, horizons.

Lanning Shields' imagery draws upon the classic formula and subject matter of the great American landscape. He then subverts the romanticism of the untamed by highlighting its many restraints, that being man's indelible influence on the land. False bucks with young watch guard over Kansas plains while the desert's most defensive flora become nothing more than attraction. 

— Derrick Jefferies