ART-PRESENTATION: Scott McFarland-Sky Leaks

By combining analogue and digital processes, Scott McFarland creates photos presenting a reality that is both truthful and fabricated. Each work, rather than being the result of a single shot, is composed of several images, carefully reworked and digitally superimposed. Private gardens, zoos, farms, the relationships between human beings, animals, and their environment, photographic processes, and the history of art and of photography are some of his themes.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Fort Gansevoort Gallery Archive

Scott McFarland presents recent works at his solo exhibition “Sky Leaks” at Fort Gansevoort Gallery in New York. The 11 photos of the series “Skyleaks” that gives the title of the exhibition, is a series that depicts skies captured through traditional analogue means on colour negative film with a 4×5 large format camera. The luminous subject is rendered lifelike in LED light box displays. The artist makes use of expired and defective film that has been kept for many years until a purpose was found for its use, in others, light spilled through cracks in the back and bellows of his camera. In the past exposures that exhibited these flaws and defects were often discarded by the artist, however in “Skyleaks” these unique and unpredictable results are purposefully chosen over more prefect captures made at the same time. “Shattered Glass” is a photo/video installation of a winter landscape through a broken window. Through a dizzying mosaic of shattered glass can be seen a tranquil pastoral landscape of snow and trees. The fragments of glass at once reference the artist’s cultivated process of piecing together his works, the camera lens, and the root language of digital photography, pixels. Using a DLSR camera mounted on a tripod panning device, the 4k video and photographic stills were shot at the same time. As the camera pans fluidly from left to right over the course of nine minutes, the viewer’s gaze moves from interior to exterior space. The final transmounted chromogenic print, realized as a landscape tableau, is actually a composite of several frames shot in a similar proportion to the monitor, using portrait orientation. Because the two components of this work are backlit using a similar LED technology, their visual qualities are unified, allowing both formats to be situated on more equal footing. In McFarland’s work, the viewer’s understanding of what they see or think they see is challenged. Fundamental questions concerning the relationship between time and space arise and one is left wondering and imaging what is real and what lies beneath.

Info: Fort Gansevoort Gallery, 5 9th Avenue, New York, Duration: 11/2-11/3/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.fortgansevoort.com