A new art exhibit, "Vantage Points: Campus as Place" will feature photographs of Carleton College by three Minnesota photographers, who were invited to use their unique creative lenses to present the Carleton College campus at the beginning of the 21st Century. The show, with 36 photos that reveal different aspects of the Carleton landscape and architecture, is intended to stimulate conversation about the abstract idea of place. The exhibit will be open to the public from Friday, Feb. 15 to Sunday, March 10 at the Carleton College Art Gallery. A reception for those interested in a guided tour of the show will be held at 2 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 24. The photographers will talk about their work at another reception from 7-9 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 27. Both Art Gallery events are free and open to the public.
The idea for the show was inspired by two intersecting events, said Laurel Bradley, curator of the College art collection and director of exhibitions. Administrators wanted to celebrate the role of architecture and landscape at Carleton as the college prepares to hire a design firm to come up with a master plan for the campus and as President Stephen R. Lewis, Jr. nears his retirement date of June 30. Six new buildings went up during Lewis’s presidency, so the end of his tenure was an appropriate time to commission artistic representations of the College, Bradley said.
The three participating artists were selected from a pool of photographers without connections to Carleton. The artists were favored, in part, because of their lack of emotional ties with the campus. "They were intentionally chosen as outsiders who would end up presenting something that would resonate within the hearts and minds of the Carleton community because of their sensitivity as artists, but also come up with something unexpected because of their outsider status," Bradley said.
The artists, Alec Soth, Beth Dow and Chris Faust, are all fairly young, professional photographers who use very different techniques in their work, Bradley said. Soth, of Minneapolis, makes large color prints. In his work for "Vantage Points," he used windows as a device to represent the relationship between inside and outside. Dow is a graduate of St. Olaf College in Northfield who now lives in Minneapolis. She uses a "pictorialist" aesthetic with small images in toned black and white. Faust is a University of Minnesota graduate who now lives in Fort Riley, Kan. He works with a large, panoramic format. His black and white panoramic images of Carleton reveal interesting juxtapositions, Bradley said.
In addition to encouraging conversation about what makes Carleton special, Bradley hopes the show will also encourage people to think about the photographs they would have taken to represent Carleton.
To view photos from the "Vantage Points" exhibit, click on the name of the photographer: Alec Soth | Beth Dow | Chris Faust