It’s our pleasure to announce BigTown Projects’ Summer Exhibition:

AMERICAN GEOGRAPHY

Virginia Beahan & Jim Dow 

July 4th - September 15, 2024

Opening Reception, Saturday, July 20th

AMERICAN GEOGRAPHY

“Americans look upon water as an inexhaustible resource. It’s not, if you’re mining it…”---from ASSEMBLING CALIFORNIA by John McPhee

“The smell of America says, ‘come and buy’…”​---from TRAVELS IN SIBERIA By Ian Frazier

The United States is a huge country, in landmass behind its neighbor Canada and in a dead heat with its nemesis, China--but gigantic by any measurement (length and breadth), perception (Hollywood and popular culture) or influence (money and the military).

Virginia Beahan and Jim Dow have been taking photographs for a long time, traveling all over the United States, even crossing one another’s tire tracks, although on separate journeys in different times.

The relative humidity, or lack thereof, is higher in Jim’s pictures and lower in Virginia’s, at least in the selection on view here. The desiccated landscape and conditions around Slab City and the Salton Sea are markedly different than in verdant northeastern Pennsylvania or humid South Louisiana, resulting in quite singular weathering and patinas. And when the color and/or tonalities of the prints amplify the atmospherics of each artist’s ideas and intentions, these variations stand out dramatically, as in the deep, orange-browns of the desert vs. the glow of neon at dusk near a bayou.

Cynics and critical thinkers might take the quotes at the beginning as representative of two projects that could be described as documenting the marking and usage of the natural world for human purposes; sometimes suspect, occasionally humorous, often clashingly vernacular.

But that ignores the fascination both artists feel in the presence of their chosen subjects, which leads them to be deliberate, precise and respectful in their depictions. Virginia, “inspired by the sheer distance and varied terrain” of California at an early age, and later, the reciprocal human relationship with the land. Jim, from the first, looking for objects that “now function more as fragments of histories, the subjects themselves prevailing over memories.”

This tension between multiple approaches and subtle layers of meaning is embedded in each these photographs.

Virginia Beahan & Jim Dow – Lyme Center, NH & Belmont, MA

May 2024