Archer Gallery presents Range, works by Thomas Allen, Harrison Higgs, Andrew O’Brien, Devon Oder, and Robert Smith.  These artists explore landscape in varied approaches: mystifying the land, creating illusions, exploring representations, and abstraction. Using a variety of methods including photography, video, mixed media and sculpture, these artists explore landscape as science, concept, a physical presence, and a metaphorical or religious manifestation.
 
Thomas Allen’s (SW Michigan) collaged tableaus highlight characters from pulp fiction books.  Through his interest in narratives, he has made works that focus on the landscape in which his figures reside.  These scenes highlight the landscape’s ability to create suspense and a sense of the cinematic.  

Harrison Higgs (Vancouver, WA) employs the concept of terraforming, making a planet habitable through inventive use of resources and technology, in his work.  Going between physical sculpture, reflections, and photographs, the works give us views of staged props of varied materials as well as the resulting abstractions, referencing the natural and the manmade.  

Andrew O’Brien’s (Chattanooga, TN) Field Office series uses photographs of landscape as well as materials connected with land use planning: spray paint, flagging tape, and plotter prints. These materials and images create a dialogue between exterior and interior space and between the landscape and its representation.  

Devon Oder (Los Angeles, CA) creates fragmented and foreboding landscapes, employing techniques of Polaroid emulsion manipulations, multiple exposures, and light filters. Her work utilizes these technical photographic processes to tie abstract and representational images together, completing her mysterious vision by the marriages of many methods and views.  

Robert Smith (Eugene, OR) uses torqued mirrors and lenses to create swirling abstracted visions of coastal Southern swampland, reminiscent of ghost mirrors used in lowcountry homes to ward away spirits.  The haunting illusions are paired with cypress knees in the space, connecting the mirrors and projected videos into a space imagined but also tied to the history and mysticism of the South.

Special thanks to the artists, Michael Foley and Foley Gallery, Jeanine Jablonski and Fourteen30 Contemporary, Jessica Bromer, Katherine Shell, the Associate Students of Clark College, and the Clark College Art Department.

–Blake Shell, Archer Gallery Director