Entropy and Memory

The Phatory is pleased to announce Entropy and Memory, an exhibition of photographs by Scott Walden, opening January 14 and on display until February 12. There will be a reception on Friday January 14, from 7 until 9 p.m.

 

Walden's large-format, black-and-white landscape photographs deal with traces of human presence in the land. Unsettled (2000) depicts the physical remnants of isolated Newfoundland fishing communities abandoned in the 1950s and ’60s as a result of government efforts to centralize and modernize rural populations. Images of disintegrating homes, schools, and churches act as metaphors for the loss of human significance that occurs as generations with memories of life in these former communities are replaced by younger generations raised in newer, government-sanctioned "growth centers." Meadowlands (1995) takes as its subject matter the famously underdeveloped region just west of Manhattan, and uses the techniques of West Coast landscape photography to deal with traditional East Coast concerns, such as the potential for artifacts in an otherwise natural environment to act as monuments, not to an heroic past, but to an entropic future.

 

Scott Walden's photographs have been published in CVphoto, Prefix Photo, and Maclean's Magazine, and his book based on the Unsettled series, Places Lost: In Search of Newfoundland's Resettled Communities, went to press in 2003. His work has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, and is in the collections of the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador, the Canada Council Art Bank, and the Alcan Corporation. Walden received a Ph.D in philosophy from the Graduate School, City University of New York in 1994. He has taught courses on philosophical issues in photography at New York University, has published on photography in The British Journal of Aesthetics, and is currently editing an anthology of essays by philosophers on photography for Blackwell Publishing.