Preserving Place: Reflections of Indiana, an exhibition showcasing nearly 50 photographic responses to the landscape and natural heritage of the state of Indiana, will be on view at the Carnegie Center for Art and History from June 11 through July 16, 2005. Preserving Place is a collaboration between the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the IMA-Columbus Gallery and The Nature Conservancy in Indiana, and is a companion exhibition to In Response to Place: Photographs from The Nature Conservancy’s Last Great Places, which was at the IMA in Indianapolis May 11 through August 3, 2003.

There will be an opening reception for this exhibit on Friday, June 10 from 6-8 pm. Visitors can enjoy refreshments and live music by the Jamey Aebersold Jazz Quartet. Copies of the book Unexpected Indiana, a portfolio of Indiana’s natural beauty from close-ups to sweeping landscapes of forests, rivers, prairies, dunes and swamps, will be available for purchase, and authors Ron Leonetti and Christopher Jordan will be on hand for a book signing. This event is free and the public is invited to attend.

Preserving Place is a juried invitational for which entrants were encouraged to create images that not only captured the natural beauty of the Indiana landscape, but also expressed the artist’s personal reaction to and beliefs about the space we inhabit.

The exhibition explores the personal relationships that the photographers have with the land. The questions addressed by the works are as important as the images themselves. Some of the ideas presented by these photographs include how human intervention has affected natural areas and our perception of them; whether we have been good stewards of the land that
our great-grandparents tamed from the wilderness; and the question of whether wilderness areas still exist in Indiana.

Vernon Cheek, juror for the exhibition, is professor emeritus of visual and performing arts at Purdue University. His many accomplishments include a Fulbright scholarship to teach photography in India. Cheek’s works are in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, as well as private collections in the United States and Japan.

Sky Table II, 2000
Charles Gick, Layayette

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