Viewfinder #37 by Meggan Gould. Gould's photography exhibit, "Traces of Vision," will be featured in the College of Southern Maryland's Tony Hungerford Memorial Art Gallery on the La Plata Campus through Sept. 29. The artist's lecture will be at 2:30 p.m. Sept. 27.LA PLATA, Md. (Sept. 15, 2016)—Photographer Meggan Gould's "Traces of Vision" will kick off the College of Southern Maryland's season for 2016-17 at the Tony Hungerford Memorial Art Gallery. Her show will run through 29. There will be an artist lecture at 2:30 p.m. Sept. 27 in the La Plata Campus, Learning Resource Center, Room 102 with a reception to follow.
Gould lives and works in New Mexico, where she is an assistant professor of art at the University of New Mexico. She received an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and a BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Her photographs have been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally. In 2014, she was a nominee for the Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers and a finalist in 2012 for the Clarence John Laughlin Award. Most recently, "Traces of Vision" has been shown at Montgomery College's Cafritz Foundation Arts Center Open Gallery in Takoma Park.
Her current work is primarily interested in using photography to examine the practice of photographing, and in the lives of photographs as objects.
"Visualizing layers of information/knowledge is a continual undercurrent within my work; I look to exploit the ability of the photograph to stop our vision at an ostensibly superficial level of mutable, mundane surfaces," Gould said. "This recent work looks to the small scale of the surface of familiar objects, specifically iPads and camera viewfinders. I am fascinated by how we look at and visually process screens in our screen-soaked culture; the thought of touch-screens being so integrated into daily life would have been unthinkable a mere few years ago."
Gould's interest in surface, and the use of technology, has taken many forms over the years. "As with the iPad surfaces, I have used the photograph to separate the viewfinder's quirks from the world beyond and examining how these glass and plastic forms inform and shape our photographic visions. Histories of looking are embedded in the glass in the form of dust and scratches; etched and painted lines and text discipline and direct our sight. Meant to be looked through, to ostensible scenes beyond, what happens if our vision is arrested at these thresholds?" she said.
The body of work on display began in the teaching classroom, after years of looking through viewfinders to reassure students that the bulk of the scratches and dust they see are lodged in the glass of the viewfinder, and not irreparable lens flaws that will show up in each image, Gould said.
"My refrain of 'it won't show up in the picture' became interesting to me, and I began to look more closely at the mediated experience of single-lens reflex capture. Each camera becomes a miniature universe, one that begins with the manufacturer's specific, and often enigmatic, marks and grows, over years and decades, into a repository of an individual story of a camera's care and life in the world," she said.
Dominic Sansone's "# the drone life" will be featured Oct. 10-Nov. 3. Gregory T. Davis' "Impermanence of Knowledge" will be shown Nov. 14-Dec. 8. Jim Arendt's "Selvage" will be featured from Feb. 6-March 9, followed by the Annual Juried Student Exhibition from April 10-May 5. Submissions for the student exhibition will be accepted from March 28 to April 1. The jury will select exhibition works April 5.
These shows will be at the Tony Hungerford Memorial Art Gallery at the La Plata Campus, Fine Arts Center. The gallery is open 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Friday and 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday. Artist lectures are usually held Tuesday afternoons and are free and open to the public.
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