PHOTOGRAPHIC RESOURCE CENTER at boston university

introduction

Land/Mark : Locative Media and Photography
April 8-May 5, 2005
An exhibition held in conjunction with the Boston Cyberarts Festival.
Part of the PRC’s Northeast Exposure gallery series

Land/Mark is a group exhibition featuring artists who engage photography with location-based media, global technologies, and larger geographical systems. Using the parsed phrase “Land/Mark” as a starting point and inspiration, this PRC exhibition highlights Boston-area artists Margot Kelley, Brooke Knight, and Josh Winer, and the new media, public art project Yellow Arrow, but also points to various other exhibitions and events related to mapping all over the city. Held in conjunction with the Boston Cyberarts Festival (April 22-May 8), this gallery showing represents the third time the PRC has joined local organizations celebrating art and technology since the festival’s founding in 1999.

Uniting geography, media, and photography has a long history and is a befitting topic for a festival celebrating art and technology. The city of Boston, too, has a storied geographical and photographic past. Even going so far as the creation of land itself—from the filling in of the Back Bay to the Big Dig—this city has molded its land to fit its ever-changing needs. Nevertheless, despite, or perhaps because of, the latest locative technologies, we still manage to get lost.

Featured work in the exhibition includes Kelley’s investigation of the GPS (Global Positioning System) game geocaching through color photographs and narrative; Knight’s ground studies near landmarks and minute confluences; and Winer’s large format coordinate-titled images of land in flux. Also on display is a live-feed slideshow from Yellow Arrow’s database (yellowarrow.net) of arrows placed in the environment, which during the Cyberarts festival will feature only photographs and arrows in the Boston-area. Both Kelley’s project and Yellow Arrow’s interface with the internet, involve text, and reference gaming—employing a playful, yet powerful, approach to interpreting and personalizing the environment—whereas Winer’s and Knight’s work more obliquely alludes to inscribing the land and begins to question the idea of landscape itself. Themes of cartography, surveillance, networks, and alternative and subjective geographies emerge as these artists participate in some form of marking the land while showing the marks already on it.

- Leslie K. Brown, PRC Curator