January 8, 2007
Niagara by Elliot Anderson
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Art professor has solo exhibition at de Young Museum
By Scott Rappaport
Assistant professor of art and electronic media Elliot Anderson will have a
solo exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, opening on January 13
and running to May 15. Titled "Average Landscapes," the show is part of the
de Young’s Connections Gallery series.
Anderson's work examines the relationship between 19th-century American
landscape painting and contemporary tourist photography. “Using custom
software I search the Internet for images based on titles of paintings by Hudson
River School painters -- people such as Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic
Edwin Church, and Thomas Moran,” said Anderson. “The software
returns everyday snapshots of the places represented in the paintings. I then
average these images together using additional custom software to create a
merged image that contains ghosts of all the images collected.”
The exhibition will contain 13 large-scale digital transparencies mounted
on ligthboxes, a series of "souvenir" plates with digital transfers
of the landscapes, and video.
The de Young is
located at 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.