Plane Space is delighted to present Losing Ground, a group exhibition bringing together three photographers, Chad Gerth, Maureen Keaveny, and Steven B. Smith, and the paintings of Michelle Hailey.

This exhibition of photographs and paintings addresses our perception of and relationship to landscape, which, like the land itself, is continually shifting. This transitioning perspective, which can often leave the viewer disoriented, divided, or perhaps nostalgic, is what the four artists in Losing Ground convey by confronting the line between the man-made and the natural world. The show’s title both points to the irreversible effects that man has had on nature as well as the way in which each of the artists in the exhibition captures three-dimensional space in two-dimensions. The resulting imagery articulates qualities that push and pull, reflect and deflect, intersect and overlap, romanticize and systematize. Chad Gerth’s photographs, from his series Empty Lots, are taken from an aerial view, resulting in minimal, abstracted images that reveal a formal beauty and flattened composition that is similar to a painting. Michelle Hailey’s romantic and theatrical paintings are infused with the artist’s longing to reconnect with the California landscape as a result of her feeling isolated from a place with which she can identify. Maureen Keaveny’s photographs from her series Purgatory Road, were taken in the New England landscape along a road of the same name. The dark and sublime images question, as the title suggests, the in-between state of the land. Keaveny’s images broach, with some trepidation, the extent to which mankind has, and will continue to, alter their natural surroundings. Steven B. Smith has been photographing areas of the Western landscape as it has transitioned into suburbia for over 15 years. In Smith’s photograph Deer Creek, Utah, 2007, a fabricated mountain range affixed to the gate of a newly constructed home is depicted with its modeled-after range spanning across the background behind it. This striking dichotomy between nature and mankind’s homage to it (despite its intrusion upon it) demonstrates the conflict found in much of Smith’s work.

Gerth received his M.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has exhibited regularly at Corkin Gallery in Toronto, as well as New York, Illinois, and California. Hailey recently received her M.F.A from Hunter College and her work has been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. Keaveny attended Rhode Island School of Design where she received her M.F.A. in photography. She has exhibited in New York, Chicago, and Providence. Smith received his M.F.A from Yale School of Art and he was awarded the First Book Prize for Photography by the Honickman Foundation and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. The Weather and a Place to Live: Photographs of the Suburban West, was published by Duke University Press (2005). He has received Guggenheim and Aaron Siskind Fellowships; his work can be found in many public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.