The fine Portland Art Museum is showing a range of newly acquired photographic works in a new exhibit, “Beyond Place”.
From the Portland Art Museum site:
Beyond Place: Recent Photography Acquisitions
DEC 5, 2009 – MAR 14, 2010
Beyond Place: Recent Photography Acquisitions explores place as a subject in photographs by an international roster of artists. The selected works are mostly free of the human figure and focus instead on the power of the photograph to imaginatively transport the viewer, to inspire emotional musings, and to reveal the unknown.
From documentary investigations of contaminated landscapes to sensuous portraits of nature to intimate views of private rooms, these photographs reveal how the experience of a place is commemorated, displaced, ciphered, or changed through the artist’s intervention.
Artists include Adam Bartos, Susan Dobson, Beth Dow, Pedro Lobo, David Maisel, Saul Robbins, and Donald Weber.
Since 2003, the Museum, with the support of patrons James and Susan Winkler, has set about expanding its holdings of contemporary photography and, related to that effort, to chronicle the exhibition history of Blue Sky Gallery in Portland through gifts and purchases from their exhibitions. It is from the resulting Blue Sky Gallery Collection of more than three hundred images that the 50 works in this exhibition were drawn.
Bruce Guenther, curator of modern and contemporary art