Exhibition Featuring Professor Emeritus Gary Cawood to Open in Pine Bluff
A solo photography exhibition featuring the work of Gary Cawood, a professor emeritus at UA Little Rock and fine art photographer, will open Jan. 19 in the Loft Gallery of The ARTSpace in Pine Bluff.
Cawood’s exhibition, “Gary Cawood: Field Notes, explores human-altered landscapes.
“While humans alter the landscape, nature continually reasserts its force,” Cawood said in an artist statement. “Shiny and new becomes rusted and worn. Unintended plant life proliferates. My purpose is to celebrate this process visually, with the graduated scale as a perfect counterpoint to the random effects of nature.”
Cawood added that he also enhances the ambiguity of his photographs by obscuring the sense of scale.
“To further enhance the ambiguity, much smaller measuring devices are sometimes placed on a print and re-photographed,” Cawood said. “Specimens gathered from the sites are also included. How big or how small depends on context—compared to what? By confounding the viewer’s sense of scale, I hope to convey the intrigue I found in these seemingly ordinary scenes.”
The exhibition will be open through April 13 with a free public reception from 5-7 p.m. on Jan. 19. The exhibition is sponsored by Relyance Bank, and the reception is sponsored by MK Distributors.
In “Gary Cawood: Field Notes,” the artist uses the camera as an effective note-taking device.
“His work in this series of 33 images emphasizes scale as an element of visual composition, exploring various ways the measuring scale can be integrated into the scene, sometimes titling the effect to be more ambiguous than factual,” explained Kevin Haynie, the ARTx3 Campus’s curator of collections and exhibitions.
Cawood received his Master of Fine Arts degree from East Tennessee State University in 1976 and his Bachelor of Architecture degree from Auburn University in 1970.
His photographs have been widely exhibited throughout the United States, including in more than 60 solo shows and approximately 100 two-person and group shows. He has received visual artist fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mid-America Arts Alliance, and the Arkansas Arts Council. His work is included in numerous public collections, including the Smithsonian National Museum of American Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Library of Congress, the Amon Carter Museum, and the New Orleans Museum of Art.
For more information about Cawood and to view more of his work, visit his website garycawood.com.
