BARRY UNDERWOOD
Artist Statement
These images are documentations of dioramas and full-scale installations that are built on-site in the landscapes. I use these as the means to explore issues of illusion, imagination, narrative, and the potential of the ordinary. I approach my photographic work with a theatrical sensibility that pemits me to intermingle issues that arise from contemporary painting, cinema and land art. The resulting images are surreal images, givent that they result from this cross-pollination between traditional photography and theater. Light and color are used as subjective tools, affecting the perception of space while defamiliarizing common objects. In this work, therefore, illusionistic space collapses while the lights that I install appear as intrusions and interventions as they contrast with the inherent atmospheric properties of natural light. This combination renders the forms in the landscape abstract.
Artist Bio
Barry Underwood graduated with a BA in photography and theater from Indiana University and an MFA from Cranbook Academy of Art. His work has been shown locally and internationally: Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, Houston, Cleveland, New York, Kentucky, Canada and Basel, Switzerland. Underwood was Artist-in-Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts as well as I-Park in Connecticut and Banff Center for the Arts in Alberta, Canada. He is currently a professor at the Cleveland Institute of Art as well as head of the film, video and photographic arts department.
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