- Artist or Maker
- Anthony Lepore
United States, Los Angeles, California, born 1977, active Los Angeles - Title
- Sunrise
- Date Made
- 2010
- Medium
- Inkjet print (pigment based)
- Dimensions
- Frame: 51 1/4 × 41 1/4 × 2 1/4 in.
- Accession Number
- M.2011.90
- Collecting Area
- Photography
- Curatorial Notes
In his New Wilderness series, Anthony Lepore contemplates our twentieth-century mediation of nature, one that is shaped by human invention and intervention. Focused on the park or wilderness experience in the American West, his images recast the wild as seen in the restaging of the low-budget theater that is the park visitor center. Such welcome areas exist physically but in no way experientially: within them we are not physically exposed to and lost in nature—that is, in these spaces we are merely on the periphery of the sublime; they are, nevertheless, key to the contemporary idea of wilderness. In these unnatural foyers, such as the inspiration for Sunrise, which was taken in Death Valley National Park, visitors are instructed on what to expect in the open spaces they are about to enter via maps, brochures, and, of course, photography, through which idealized visions perpetuate an aestheticization of nature. In creating ambiguous images that appear to be collaged or digitally altered, Lepore reflects on both our highly mediated experience of nature and our predominant way of contemplating it—through photography.
Eve Schillo
2021
- Copyright
- © Anthony Lepore
