The show includes a new series of photographs entitled “Landscapes”. These pictures are proto-cinematic landscapes imbedded with a temporal presentness. In them, small objects perform as surrogates, stand-ins for a romanticized reality that lies somewhere between Casper David Friedrich and Hitchcock. Unlike traditional photography, they do not slice time but rather suspend it. The images are stripped of their narrative content to promote an open reading. No specific next moment is implied nor is the situational context described. The viewer must draw meaning from their individual experiences, transferring it to on to the picture to color and sequence the story. In this way, the pictures rely on the idiosyncratic gaze to supply the textual content.

McCurdy is not a photographer, nor is he a painter, but an artist who uses a chosen medium to manipulate the interaction between the viewer and the artwork. In his earlier “Flower” photographs, McCurdy has immersed himself in studies of Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Dutch flower painting. The dynamic of these photographs is superficially still-life, but the basic element of time lies beneath in these recreations of historical paintings rooted in centuries old traditions, that have been recorded in the neoteric medium of photography. The viewer climbs the string that links the past and present. McCurdy’s portrait paintings are of people but not about them. He writes, “During the [portrait] sitting, I look for a sustainable moment; one where there is no before or after. It is why there is no movement, no expression or gesture… The image is reported rather than interpreted. The technique is calculated to minimally filter the experience. There are no clues as to how the viewer should feel.”