My artwork examines community and land-use in rural, suburban and urban sites. I create installations by researching local agricultural, industrial, and recreational land use. Curiosity about ecological and social history of specific places drives my work. By revealing the beauty and potential of an ordinary landscape an everyday scene is transformed into a memorable, visual experience. Each photograph image is a dialogue – the result of my direct encounter with nature and history. Inspired by land art, landscape photography, and painting, as well as cinema, my images are both surreal and familiar. This tension between the familiar and the surreal gives the images a strange power. The photographs are documentations of full-scale installations that are built on-site. I fashion these scenes by immersing myself in a place, instinctively reading the landscape, and then altering the site through LED lights, luminescent material, and other photographic effects. In the final prints, lights and alterations appear as intrusions, transforming landscapes into abstract images.
Barry Underwood
Studios
Adams
Barry Underwood worked in the Adams studio.
Given to the MacDowell Association by Margaret Adams of Chicago, the half-timbered, stuccoed Adams Studio was designed by MacDowell Fellow and architect F. Tolles Chamberlin ca. 1914. Chamberlin was primarily a painter, but also provided designs for the Lodge and an early renovation of the main hall. The studio’s structural integrity was restored during a thorough renovation in…