A 1980 project documenting the eruption of Mount Saint Helens from the air, prompted Gowin to shift his attention from natural cataclysms to manmade changes. He first saw the nuclear landscape flying over the abandoned city of Old Hanford on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington, where the first reactors had been built to make plutonium for the atomic bomb. Since then, he has produced aerial photographs of the Nuclear Heartland in Arizona and Nevada. Viewed from above, irrigation systems, nuclear test sites and waste dumps appear as elegant lines and textures in these subtly toned prints. Photography represents the world we know, and suggests a world beyond what we can see.
Creativity is the gap between perception and knowledge.
This show is the first to draw on the Thomas P. Whitney 37 Collection of Russian Art, a recent donation to Amherst of works created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by artists in Russia and in exile. Admission and parking are free. The Gowin exhibition and his lecture are sponsored in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.