MTSU Faculty Exhibition on view March 24 – April 15, 2022
Join the MTSU Photography faculty on Thursday, March 24 from 6–8pm for an opening reception in the Baldwin Photographic Gallery. The exhibition includes the work of Chuck Arlund, Elijah Barrett, Alex Crawford, Kristine Potter, Shannon Randol, and Jonathan Trundle.
ELIJAH BARRETT
Personas is a suite of large-scale, black and white portraits of young people. In this work, Barrett is interested in playfully confusing the notions of subject and photographer, the scene and the behind-the-scenes, realism and self-consciousness. Suspended between past and present, sincerity and affect, the pictures long romantically and nostalgically for the good looks, vitality, and idealism of youth, while at the same time seeing youth as an illusory repository for our desires and regrets.
Alex Crawford
I began carrying a 35mm film camera with me about ten years ago. It started as a pastime, a hobby to keep me occupied between larger projects. Over the years it grew into a creative outlet for capturing things around me that I found compelling or funny. But recently it has become more of a compulsion. After over a decade of having my little camera on my person almost constantly, it has become a comfort object instead of a tool. If I don’t take at least one photo throughout my day, by evening I find myself wandering around with an urgent feeling of having forgotten an important task. These images are less about an interesting subject matter and more about the thing itself, the act of taking the photo, the camera as a habit, the image as a chore.
KRISTINE POTTER
Created while working in remote areas along the Western slope of Colorado between 2012 and 2015, Kristine Potterbuilds on her previous investigations of masculinity and the American Soldier, here fixing her gaze on a parallel archetype, the American Cowboy.
Uncovering a world far more formidable and disorienting than the canon of traditional western landscape photography had previously detailed, Potter encounters men who sparingly dot the terrain, seemingly both tethered to, and in divergence with, the myth that precedes them.
Manifest does not act as a documentary, but rather as a re-coding of the western myth, the territory and its men, it is both fantasy and reality.
Weaving body and landscape, the book lays open the seduction of the West, the opportunities it promises, the disorientation of altitude, and the confrontation of persistent danger.
Shannon Randol
How the singular subject, viewer in the case of photography, is located in relation to other objects is referred to as spatial relation. Often happening subconsciously, ways in which objects respond to each other impacts the use(s) of a particular space. Consider lines on a roadway, a queue at an event, or perhaps a sidewalk. Where these examples differ in physicality, they align in terms of social contract. Nothing stops someone from crossing into another traffic lane, ducking under the rope, or walking off the sidewalk other than the understanding that public space has been designed to be shared and navigated in certain ways. The communal spaces in these images exhibit ways in which design and function sometimes clash and sometimes work in harmony; in either condition they do affect ways in which space is engaged.
JONATHAN TRUNDLE