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McMurtrey Gallery is proud to announce notable photographer Dornith Doherty's first solo exhibition at the gallery. Part landscape and part still-life, Doherty's newest body of work depicts the reality of the Rio Grande terrain, while also commenting on critical issues affecting the region through her subtle, yet surreal combination of objects and images.
As described by Sara-Jayne Parsons, Dornith Doherty's work "addresses the cultural landscape of the Rio Grande and reflects therein a complicated relationship between human agency and the natural environment. She began her investigations in 2002, photographing along the banks of the Rio Grande and exploring its immediate topography, from mountain source to coastal mouth. The resulting images metaphorically reveal a natural region that is being reconfigured by a host of crucial and sometimes violent forces, including environmental politics, immigration, and economic inequities. And while they exist as re-visioned landscapes, her works are in fact straight photographs.
After photographing on the Rio Grande, Doherty returned to her studio and started to project photographic images of the river landscape onto assemblages of natural history specimens and cultural artifacts collected from her onsite work.
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quot;The found objects she incorporates into the still-lifes "invoke the complexity of human experiences she had witnessed along the river, as well as refer to the immediacy of her personal experience within this landscape. Doherty then rephotographed the still-lifes, illuminated by the projected imagery, using a view camera. Presented here in mural size, reflecting the large scale of the landscapes portrayed, Doherty’s photographs are exuberant, yet elegiac vignettes that trace and exhale the contemporary life of the Rio Grande."
Ms. Doherty's photographs have been featured in over 65 national and international exhibitions, and are included in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Milwaukee Museum of Art, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. A recipient of grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the Japan Foundation, the United States Department of the Interior, the Indiana Arts Commission, and the Society for Contemporary Photography, Doherty received a BA cum laude in Spanish and French language and literature at Rice University, and an MFA in Photography from Yale University. She is currently Associate Professor of Photography at the University of North Texas.
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 Interactive Exhibition
Dornith Doherty 2007 Bio
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