Photographer Gary Cawood, professor emeritus at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, presents Field Notes, a new exhibition on view Feb. 2 through April 16, 2024, at The ARTSpace on Main.
Field Notes is a series of 33 images that incorporate a measuring scale into various landscape scenes, particularly of sites where natural contours of the landscape have been disturbed or disrupted, such as abandoned quarries, or excavations for new construction projects. The use of the measuring stick serves to frame the scenes from a pseudoscientific perspective, mixing fact and subjectivity into one image.
Kevin Haynie, curator of collections and exhibitions, sat down with Cawood and asked him more about his work and career as an artist.
Haynie: Tell us about your background and what pushed you in the direction of photography.
Cawood: In junior high school, I wanted to be an architect, and so I set off and got information to prepare for a college career in architecture. It required two years of art, and to give you an idea of where I was at that point, I was dumbfounded. I thought, “Why would an architect need to study art?” That’s how ignorant I was, you know? But I had a wonderful high school art teacher, and I caught on real quickly that it’s not necessarily about drawing an apple to look like an apple or a face to look like a face. There’s a lot more about composition and creativity and adventure, and I just fell in love with it. In high school art class, I loved to draw and just have fun with it.
However, I did go to architecture school. In architecture school, it's important to be very precise. I did not do well in the drawing aspect. There were aspects of architecture I think I was really good at. But at any rate, photography seemed like a better option for me. As soon as I finished my architecture degree, I took Photo I in the summer of 1970. Then, I took photography classes while working in the architect’s office. When I came back to East Tennessee State, I just kind of fumbled into graduate school. It was a new program, so I was the first MFA in photography.
H: What led you to create the work for Field Notes? What are the primary themes surrounding this collection?
C: Well, Stephen Shore is not my all-time favorite artist, but he had a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. He had one series of very large black-and-white prints of excavation sites. So after that, I just Googled archaeological photographs. And there was one photo in particular that had the meter stick in it, which I think is kind of typical if you Google "archaeological paraphernalia" or something like that. So that’s where I got the idea that I could use this very simple prop.
I started by doing these photographs of wild grasses and so forth, and I worked a lot on sites that had been disturbed, like construction sites … and where things grow back on their own, not planted or cultivated. So I started working on that series and started putting sticks in there. These sites in this Field Notes series, for the most part, are sites around central Arkansas I’ve gone back to.
H: What are you hoping that viewers of Field Notes take away from this exhibition?
C: I’m hoping that even viewers who aren’t big fans of photography or even art in general will have a way into my work. That’s why I included a stick in each picture in this kind of pseudoscientific reference. In this work called “Gully,” the stick is across the gully, so you can make up this narrative like you are a hydrologist or something measuring … thinking about the flow of water or something like that. Hopefully, this narrative or scientific sense of measurement will give more viewers a way into the artwork.
H: As a photographer, do you have any particular preferences for equipment or techniques?
C: In this Field Notes exhibition, I’m using the meter stick, and with the smaller works the little stick as a prop, and that’s an approach I’ve worked off and on for years. Technically, I mostly work on a tripod … I worked with a view camera for many years and had a digital back which went caput … so I’m back in the Nikon world. For those interested in photo camera talk, I use a tilt-shift lens, which makes the Nikon work sort of like a view camera … not as much as I would like. But I also have another camera that I use, a handheld; it’s more like a sketch tool.
H: Is there any particular assignment in photography that you held onto up until this day?
C: In undergraduate school, it was an assignment in Photo II in preparation for an exhibition called The Door. A door could be like some commercial space or some shack or something like that … I went all over town. I guess the reason I connected with the assignment was because of my background in architecture. In fact, there was a quotation from the Team 10 Primer book in architecture … something about the door is like a guillotine or something like that … something melodramatic about a door.
In graduate school, it was a self-assigned project my good friend recently mentioned. One project I undertook was parking spaces. And another was of grasses. I was surprised that he remembered that; I barely remembered myself because I didn’t think they were successful at that time. But interestingly, you see this new work and it relates.
H: When in that transition from architecture to photography did you feel like you felt your voice beginning to come through?
C: During the early years in Ruston at Louisiana Tech, I started to feel it. And the influence of architecture would be this obsession with structure, which, of course, you still see. But along the way, I became intrigued by this idea of the reality that you think is photography … it can be done in such a way that evokes a bright sense of mystery and planning … that back and forth between what we think we see, what's “real” and what’s possible or emotional.
If you look at the little blurb on my website about the early work, I talk about the dual influences of Lee Friedlander and Minor White, which, for people who know about photographers, this might not make a lot of sense, but I think it does. Friedlander is out there in the real world with his camera, but there is that sense of transposing reality into something mysterious. With Minor White, he’s not interested in what it is, but what else it is.
H: How has your work shifted over the years from the early stuff until now?
C: I’m always looking at paintings, sculptures … I took a few writing classes back in the ’90s … so I get my influences from all over. My advice to younger artists coming along … if you just zero in on one artist, you’ll end up copying what they do. But if you’re getting it from a broad range of influences … it’s like a visual salad that you’re mixing up, and it comes up as your own interpretation.
H: Is there any work today that you find particularly inspiring?
C: Lots of work I find particularly inspiring … lots of work I don’t. Off the top of my head … certainly Anselm Kiefer. His retrospective at the Fort Worth Modern just blew me away.
I see a lot of work that’s just very straightforward and boring to me … I think in a lot of graduate programs now there is almost a contempt for craft, and there’s almost a contempt for trying to turn something on its head. There’s a want for something straightforward, but I have this need to kind of “twist the facts,” as writers say. It may be because people are intellectually lazy. But it’s also because these are confusing times and challenging times.
H: What adversities have you faced as an artist, and what have you done to overcome them?
C: I’ve had several exhibitions all over the country and one in the Czech Republic, but my exhibitions are in “alternative spaces” like university galleries. As I mentioned, I’ve seldom sold work, and so I’ve had very little recognition in terms of photography or in terms of the art world. We speak to a very small audience. People here are about works that go for millions of dollars like those of Damien Hirst. As for myself, I do it all myself … the mounting and framing. It keeps me humble I guess, having something to do at work.
Maybe I have to play some little mind games to keep myself going. This is my passion, and this is what I do. The last show I had at the Focus Gallery at Windgate [Center of Art and Design, at UA-Little Rock] … I was talking to the students and I was very open about the fact that I very seldom sell work … I don’t know how they are going to react to that. They probably think, “Well, I’m over here working my tail off to be an artist and a photographer and I’m never going to sell work … and I’m going to be like this guy at 77 that’s in his house still making work.”
Actually, very few graduates from art programs — you know, five years, 10 years, 30 years out — are still making art in a serious way, which is very sad. I was very fortunate to have the faculty position to support myself, where making art was considered part of the job and I just continued doing that part of the job even though I’m not really getting paid for it.
H: If you had the obstacles of time, supplies, etc., how do you think your work would change or would it?
C: If I won the lottery, I like to think I would stay right here. One thing is the size of it … I’m working by today’s standards, which are very modest sizes so that I can work on them right here in my studio and handle them. We’re going to have three larger pieces that George Chambers did a wonderful job of creating the prints for. If I had unlimited resources, would I get a large-scale printer or would I have someone else print? Would I spend thousands of dollars getting them matted and framed ... and if I don’t sell them, put them in storage spaces? I kind of like the idea that I’m working here hands-on. George did a wonderful job, and he let me watch the process, but I like to think that I could do it myself.
And the other thing about size is … global warming and the problems we have with climate. As artists, shouldn’t we be thinking smaller instead of larger? Think about to heat and cool spaces like museums that hold these huge paintings.
H: What would the Gary Cawood of today say to the Gary Cawood of 20 years old?
C: Well, going back to when I started taking photo classes and then in graduate school and I’m carrying on … and of course, I didn’t know I would have any success at all … To his credit, my major professor in photography sat me down when I was applying to graduate school and said, “If you’re planning to get a teaching position, you probably won’t,” because it was already very tight, and I was very fortunate that I beat the odds. I guess what I would say is, “You don’t know, but don’t worry about it. Here I am at almost 77, and I’ve had very little recognition and sold very little work … I’m trying to figure out where to store it … but I’m very glad that I did that. As long as you’re doing what you love, then don’t worry about it.”
Learn more about Cawood and his work on his website, garycawood.com.
