Michelle VanParys

Michelle VanParys received her B.F.A. degree from Corcoran School of Art in Washington D.C.in 1982. She received her M.F.A. degree in photography from VCU in 1986. She has exhibited her work internationally and in the U.S. in shows like The South Carolina Triennal at the State Museum in Columbia, South Carolina. Her work was included in the international traveling exhibition and book titled The Altered Landscape. She has been the recipient of the Virginia Museum Fellowship and the South Carolina Arts Commission Fellowship. She is currently an associate professor at the College of Charleston in the studio art department.

"“Driving along the highways and byways of the Southwest and Interior West, Van Parys has noticed things that you or I might otherwise consider too trivial, too banal, to be worthy of further examination. Fortunately for us, Van Parys has taken the time to stop and line up her camera and take a photograph. By doing so, she makes us see things that would otherwise remain unseen. The final result is a poignant commentary not only on the desert landscapes to be found ‘out west,’ but also on the act of seeing the American West" (Batchen, Geoffrey).

Traveling from California, Nevada, and Utah through to Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado, Van Parys trains her camera’s penetrating gaze on the hard-edged natural beauty of the West—and its constantly changing contemporary identity. Whether documenting the glitter of the ever-expanding metropolises of Phoenix and Las Vegas or the quiet reserve of Monument Valley, Van Parys’s images, she explains, seek to “juxtapose nineteenth-century notions of the sublime landscape with the way in which we live on the land today, thereby drawing attention to our uneasy alliance with the natural world" (Batchen, Geoffrey; Lippard, Lucy).


I really like the ideas behind VanParys' work. She has been working on her series, The Way out West, since the 80s. She takes photographs of the landscapes out West, places where humans have insinuated themselves. VanParys wants to show the ways in which we live on our land today and how that contrasts with the old ideas of our land being a paradise, showing our uneasy alliance with the natural world. I like how she makes her environmental message simple by showing these barren landscapes that have felt the touch of human hands. The artist states, "these photographs are portraits of the land constructed and altered by human presence" (michellevanparys.com). My message isn't really the same as hers but it is one that I considered early on in this process. Some of my earlier images did contain man-made pieces but they were things that were old and crumbling and falling apart, being taken over and reclaimed by nature.

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/W/bo6166673.html

http://www.lassitergallery.com/

http://www.michellevanparys.com/index.htm