New Ucross Exhibit, “The Shape of Time”

Feature photo, installation by Elizabeth Stone, “Between Knowing and Forgetting,” slides, negatives and clear filament.

On Wednesday, August 23, the Ucross Art Gallery announced its new exhibition, “The Shape of Time: 16 Photographers and Their Creative Paths,” which opened during the Ucross Arts Festival on August 20 with 300 attendees exploring the show, meeting the curator and visiting the artists throughout the afternoon.

“The Shape of Time,” guest curated by Keith F. Davis of Sheridan, Wyoming, features 16 alumni of Ucross’s acclaimed artist residency program in northern Wyoming. The exhibition explores the nature of the creative process: where ideas are born and how — and why —an artist’s vision evolves.

“I think and hope that every viewer will find this show enriching,” Davis said. “The work is wonderfully varied in style and subject, and the overall theme gets to the heart of the artistic process. Each artist is represented by two works — one early, one more recent — and a statement on the journey in between. Years of work and thought are represented in the gap between the selected works, revealing so much about each artist’s approach. This exhibition allows us to appreciate what these superb artists have done as well as giving us special insight into how they think.”

The works in “The Shape of Time” range widely in both subject and technique. The featured artists embrace landscape and the historical resonance of place; notions of the self and family; the quality of our public spaces; politics and the state of contemporary society; and the nature of the photographic medium itself. The works included range from gelatin-silver and inkjet prints, negative images, time-based video works, and sculptural installations. In this variety, the exhibition suggests the vibrant state of photographic practice today.

The participating artists include: Barbara Bosworth of Stow, Massachusetts; Laura Cobb of Lincoln, Nebraska; Christina Fernandez of Norwalk, California; Anthony Hernandez of Fairfield, Idaho; Nicole Jean Hill of Eureka, California; Michael Kolster of Brunswick, Maine; Jin Lee of Chicago, Illinois; Serge J-F. Levy of Tucson, Arizona; Susan Moldenhauer of Laramie, Wyoming; Janet L. Pritchard of Mansfield Center, Connecticut; Victoria Sambunaris of New York, New York; Carla Shapiro of Kingston, New York; Joni Sterbach of Brooklyn, New York; Elizabeth Stone of Bonner, Montana; Youngsuk Suh of Berkeley, California, and Incheon, South Korea; and William S. Sutton of Boulder, Colorado.

Davis has been an art historian, author and curator of photography for 45 years. He oversaw the Hallmark Photographic Collection from 1979 to 2005 and was founding and senior curator of photography at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, from 2006 to 2020. He has curated more than 100 exhibitions, written or contributed to 50 books and catalogues and lectured on various aspects of art and photo history across the U.S. and abroad. Davis was an artist-in-residence at Ucross in 2022.

The exhibit will be up from August 20, 2023, through January 26, 2024. The gallery is open Monday to Saturday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.