Witho Worms “When You Look At A Landscape…”

L. Parker Stephenson Photographs

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L. Parker Stephenson Photographs presents When You Look at a Landscape…, its second exhibition with gallery artist Witho Worms. Photographed along the arctic coastline of Norway, the primeval, uninhabited panoramas of sea, glacier and mountain continue Worms’ fascination with the interplay between nature, vision and the camera. The images engage the infinitude of landscape with the limits of a frame, shaped by the artist and the technical apparatus itself.

Landscape is a natural scene mediated by culture. It is both a represented and presented space, both a signifier and a signified, both a frame and what the frame contains, both a real place and its simulacrum.
– W.J.T. Mitchell, “Theses on Landscape”, Imperial Landscape

As in his earlier series, Cette montagne c’est moi and A Forest Reconstructed, Worms brings a pragmatic, scientific rigor in defining his projects. The earlier work involved slag heaps and reforestation, unintentional landscapes hewn out of the residue of the extraction of elements from the earth. In When You Look at a Landscape… Worms considers nature both inside and outside a camera frame, as a conduit to understanding a sense of immensity and eternity outside of himself.

Rendered in three layers of carbon tissue made with Sumi ink and matt Bone Black pigment, Worms’ skills as a print-maker are foregrounded in these luminous, detailed large-format views. The blackened “cropped out” areas of these full frame 12x20 inch contact prints (edition of 3) reveal a ghostly negative of the foreground, sky, and continuous range of the horizon whereas the block masked during printing reveals itself as the image selected from the wider vista.

Witho Worms (b. 1959, living in Amsterdam) trained as a cultural anthropologist prior to his work as a photographer. His prints are represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington; the New York Public Library; the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi; Bayerische Staatliche Sammlung, Munich; and in the Netherlands at Fries Museum, Leeuwarden among others. His work has been exhibited at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Stedelijk Museum and FOAM in Amsterdam, the New York Public Library, C/O Berlin and the Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture in San Francisco. He is the author of Cette montagne c’est moi (Fw: books, 2012), an award-winning book designed and published by Hans Gremmen.