Idaho’s Fences
Jim Dow states that he wants “to record the manifestations of human ingenuity and spirit remaining in our country’s everyday landscape.” His work on barbecue joints and baseball stadiums, corner shops and sites of North Dakota are a testament to his ability to illustrate the colloquial without nostalgia or pathos but with a curiosity born from the photographer’s delight in discovering the profound in the ordinary. Dow worked with Evans on his 1971 Museum of Modern Art retrospective photographs and was deeply influenced by Evans’ photographs, which he describes as “razor sharp…pictures that read like paragraphs.”
An open exhibition June 5 – August 31 The Center, Hailey
In conjunction with the Community Library’s presentation of the Smithsonian Institution touring exhibition Between Fences, the Sun Valley Center for the Arts opens up The Center, Hailey to local photographers, illustrators, painters and printmakers to present their take on the fences that inhabit our landscape, our community and our neighborhoods. Opening Celebration and Community Welcome Party for The Center’s New Executive Director, Bill Ryberg! Fri, June 5, 5:30–7pm The Center, Hailey Join us for drinks and appetizers to celebrate local artists and to welcome The Center’s new Executive Director, Bill Ryberg, who will be joining The Center in late May.
Brittany Powell, Mini Mart (detail), 2003, cut contact paper on wall
Walker Evans, Printed by Martson Hill Editions, Post Office, Sprott, Alabama, 1936
John Hill’s large digital images are beautiful interpretations of Walker Evans’ famous photographs of sharecroppers taken in Hale County, Alabama, in the late thirties and early forties. Hill
Artist Brittany Powell creates entire environments using an unusual medium for an artist: contact paper. Powell covers walls with contact paper and then carefully cuts away, exposing parts of the walls beneath to create illusionistic images of life-size spaces. She has
has meticulously and thoughtfully culled Evans’ Farm Security Administration (FSA) images, pulling out details that expose the older photographer’s genius and provide much more detailed information than ever before. Hill taught with Evans at Yale University and is the executor of Evans’ estate. He has produced a number of books and catalogs on Evans’ work.
used this technique to recreate her childhood bedroom, a doughnut shop and a Mexican restaurant. Recently she has turned toward rural subject matter, producing an installation of images related to horses. For this exhibition, Powell is creating a small town backyard that will evoke life in the forties at the same time that elements will clearly reference rural life today. Jim Dow, Masonic Temple Billiard Room, Coopertown, ND, 1981
Stacie Brew, All Woods Must Fail, 2009