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Regen Projects
633 North Almont Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90069
tel: (310) 276-5424 fax: (310) 276-7430
www.regenprojects.com

Scott McFarland: Another Photography
October 15 - November 12, 2005
Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10am - 6pm
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 15th, 6 – 8pm


Regen Projects is pleased to announce, Another Photography, an exhibition of work by Canadian artist, Scott McFarland. This will be a debut solo exhibition of the artist’s work at Regen Projects and in the U.S. McFarland will present a group of new images made at three different garden settings in both Los Angeles and Vancouver.

The five wide format, large-scale images in Another Photography reconsider the traditional concept of a photograph as the depiction of a single moment. Produced by combining multiple negatives with the assistance of digital technology, these photographs represent variations of the landscape as a series of moments in time. In the image Orchard View many exposures of the same scene were photographed at the same time of day over the course of several weeks and seamlessly blended together to form one coherent image. The inclusion of this earlier work demonstrates McFarland’s continuation of the understanding of the pre-digital photograph as the appearance of a single moment. The more recent “panoramic style” images in the exhibition question the value of this traditional understanding when applied to the newly digital medium. In Dr. Young’s Farm several exposures from various times of the day taken over a number of weeks are combined together. Not being seamlessly blended, the image is more collage-like, with signs of its constructive aspect revealed to the viewer. There is no priority placed upon the importance of a single event. Instead the accumulation of experience by the artists’ time spent at the location is included and layered evenly.

This pictorial conception of photography in McFarland’s works was brought about by the artist’s own considerations of the garden as an artificial environment. Gardens are constructed with materials displaced from their native origins and re-presented in an unnatural, aesthetisized form. The gardener’s disruption of the natural pattern of things is akin to McFarland’s own digital manipulation of the photographic pictorial space and its contingent relation to time. The garden as an aesthetic space manufactured solely for the pleasure of the eye also informs McFarland’s own considerations about how to fabricate the image as one of beauty. In this way these images combine the underlying ideas of the subject of the garden with how it is depicted. This is made further evident in the image Reverse Horse, where the inaccuracy of the pre-photographic illustration of movement notably found in equestrian painting is reapplied to the medium without a trace of its cause – serving as a cautionary tale of digital photography’s truth-value.

Recent solo exhibitions of Scott McFarland have been organized by Union Gallery in London, England and the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, Canada. McFarland's work will be included in upcoming exhibitions, "ClickDoubleClick, The Documentary Factor" curated by Thomas Weski at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, Germany and “Intertidal”, curated by Dieter Roelstraete at MUHKA, Antwerp, Belgium.

The opening reception for Scott McFarland will take place on Saturday October 15th from 6 - 8pm. For further information please contact Shaun Caley Regen or Lisa Overduin.