The Way Out West
February 6 – 29, 1992
The cultural history of the desert southwest is inexorably intertwined with its natural history. Through my photographs I attempt to reveal these various strata, both obvious and subtle, inscribed within the landscape. I am interested in conveying a sense of local distinctiveness as well as the diversity of the region. While my work has never been intended as polemical, the desert landscape is fraught with the politics of displacement, exploitation, and land use. Therefore, any representation of that landscape has a sociopolitical dimension whether or not intended by the artist. In this sense, my photographs are conceived as open-ended meditations on the nature of human/nature interactions.
Begun in 1986, this series of photographs charts my response to the Southwest landscapes in which humans have insinuated themselves. Specifically, I seek to juxtapose 19th century art historical notions of the sublime landscape with the ways in which we live on the land today, and thus to draw attention to our uneasy alliance with the natural world. Through this work I attempt to present a range of possibilities for these interactions. At times we appear oppositional and destructive to the land in which we live and at other times harmonious and custodial. I am interested in the myriad forms this relationship takes; humorous, ironic, dangerous, and fatalistic to list a few. The frame of the camera allows me to isolate and organize elements in the landscape which reflect our complex interactions with the land, both mythical and actual.
These photographs are portraits of the land constructed and altered by human presence. Our collective cultural imprint on this geographic region is staggering. There are enticing remnants from its earliest indigenous inhabitants as well as signatures on rocks by early American Pioneers looking for a better life, spurred on by Manifest Destiny. The term, “Go West,” has come to symbolize the quest for freedom and opportunity. Now, with the construction of mega cities in the desert, the southwest is still viewed as a place to reinvent oneself, despite the obvious environmental damage that occurs when we choose to do so.
I intend my images to be as much about the invisible threads that connect us as they are visible artifacts of a contested terrain.
Michelle Van Parys is a photographic artist living in North Carolina and Professor Emerita in Studio Art at the College of Charleston where she taught photography and digital imaging for twenty-three years. Michelle received her B.F.A. from the Corcoran School of Art in Washington D.C, and her M.F.A. in Photography from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. Her photographs have been exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions.
A monograph of her photographs entitled The Way Out West: Desert Landscapes was published in 2009 by the Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago. Van Parys has been the recipient of the Virginia Museum Fellowship and the South Carolina Arts Commission Fellowship. Her work is included in several museum collections such as the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Greenville County Museum of Art in South Carolina, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, the Portland Art Museum in Oregon, the Neva da Museum of Art, the Ackland Museum of Art at UNC Chapel Hill, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Gregg Museum of Art and Design at NC State University.
Over the years Van Parys has created two major series of landscape photographs, The Way Out West: Desert Landscapes and Beyond the Plantations: Images of the New South. Both landscape series are traditional silver-based, black and white prints from negatives taken with either large or medium format cameras. Her landscape images reveal the often-troubling evidence of change within the human-inhabited landscape — geological, archeological, historical, cultural, and ecological. It is the accumulation of layers of human trace within the environment that drives her landscape photographs.
michellevanparys.com