BY KAREN BOSSICK
Artist/scholar Jock Reynolds will discuss ways that photography can illuminate our human connection to the natural world during a free talk with two photographers who have played a big role at the Sun Valley Museum of Art over the years.
Reynolds will hold a conversation with Laura McPhee who lives in the Wood River Valley and has created bodies of work investigating the landscapes of the Intermountain West, and Mark Klett, who taught photography at what was then the Sun Valley Center for the Arts during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The conversation will take place at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 7, at The Community Library in Ketchum. It will also be livestreamed on the library’s website at www.comlib.org Though free, pre-registration is required at https://svmoa.org or by calling 208-726-9491.
The three will discuss the complex role of wilderness in their work and they will address the commissioned projects they created for The Museum’s current BIG IDEA project, which examines humans’ relationship with wilderness since the signing of the 1964 Wilderness Act.
McPhee installed two immersive bodies of work that feature charred trees hanging from the museum’s ceiling amidst photographs made of hillsides following wildfire in the mountains north of Ketchum.
Klett rephotographed images he’d taken of the Wood River Valley 40 years ago to document how the human experience of nature and man’s imprint on the land have changed or remained the same.
Reynolds himself was the Henry J. Heinz II director of the Yale University Art Gallery from 1998 to 2018 and the founder of 80 Layton Street, an alternative artists’ space in San Francisco. A practicing artist, he also has served as director of the Washington Project for the Arts in Washington, D.C., and the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover.
“Jock Reynolds is deeply familiar with Laura McPhee’s and Mark Klett’s work, and the conversation he will guide promises to be a fascinating one,” said Kristin Poole, SVMoA’s artistic director.