March 28, 2024

Gould’s Photography on Display at Gallery

Gould photography at CSM 2016

Show of Photographs by Meggan Gould On Display Until Sept. 29 at CSM

Meggan Gould looks to familiar objects when she practices the art of photography, but she finds a unique way to capture them. The artist, an assistant professor of art at the University of New Mexico, will have her work on display at the Tony Hungerford Memorial Art Gallery on the La Plata Campus of the College of Southern Maryland from Sept. 6 through 29. An artist lecture will be held at 2:30 pm Sept. 27, 2016, at the La Plata Campus, Learning Resource Center, Room 102 with a reception to follow.

Ms. Gould’s photography has been exhibited throughout the world. She was nominated in 2014 for the Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers and was a finalist in 2012 for the Clarence John Laughlin Award. The show that will be on display in La Plata, “Traces of Vision,” has recently been shown at the Montgomery College’s Cafritz Foundation Arts Center Open Gallery in Takoma Park.

Ms. Gould’s current focus for her work is to use photography to examine the practice of photographing, and in the lives of photographs as objects.

“Visualizing layers of information/knowledge is a continual undercurrent within my work; I look to exploit the ability of the photograph to stop our vision at an ostensibly superficial level of mutable, mundane surfaces,” Gould said. “This recent work looks to the small scale of the surface of familiar objects, specifically iPads and camera viewfinders. I am fascinated by how we look at and visually process screens in our screen-soaked culture; the thought of touch-screens being so integrated into daily life would have been unthinkable a mere few years ago.”

Gould’s interest in surface, and the use of technology, has taken many forms over the years. “As with the iPad surfaces, I have used the photograph to separate the viewfinder’s quirks from the world beyond and examining how these glass and plastic forms inform and shape our photographic visions. Histories of looking are embedded in the glass in the form of dust and scratches; etched and painted lines and text discipline and direct our sight. Meant to be looked through, to ostensible scenes beyond, what happens if our vision is arrested at these thresholds?” she said.

The body of work on display began in the teaching classroom, after years of looking through viewfinders to reassure students that the bulk of the scratches and dust they see are lodged in the glass of the viewfinder, and not irreparable lens flaws that will show up in each image, Gould said.

“My refrain of ‘it won’t show up in the picture’ became interesting to me, and I began to look more closely at the mediated experience of single-lens reflex capture. Each camera becomes a miniature universe, one that begins with the manufacturer’s specific, and often enigmatic, marks and grows, over years and decades, into a repository of an individual story of a camera’s care and life in the world,” she said.

Ms. Gould received a masters of fine arts from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and a bachelor’s from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Ms. Gould’s photography is just the kick-off to the fall arts season of exhibits at the Hungerford Gallery.

Dominic Sansone’s “# the drone life” will be featured Oct. 10 through Nov. 3. Gregory T. Davis’ “Impermanence of Knowledge” will be shown Nov. 14 through Dec. 8. Jim Arendt’s “Selvage” will be featured from Feb. 6 through March 9, followed by the Annual Juried Student Exhibition from April 10 through May 5. Submissions for the student exhibition will be accepted from March 28 to April 1. The jury will select exhibition works April 5.

About the CSM Gallery

The Tony Hungerford Memorial Art Gallery at the La Plata Campus, Fine Arts Center is open 9 am to 9 pm Monday through Friday and 10 am to 6 pm Saturday. Artist lectures are usually held Tuesday afternoons and are free and open to the public.

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For more about the College of Southern Maryland, visit their Leader member page.

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