The Mass Cultural Council and New Art Center presented the 2017 Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellows Invitational in Photography, Sculpture/Installation/New Genres in Fall 2017. Brittany Marcoux is one of the Photography Fellows who participated in the exhibition.
The Shore Project Statement
In 2010, I spent a summer in Rangeley, Maine. As a lake house caretaker, my home for five months was thirty miles from the nearest paved road. I packed a few possessions: a camera, clothing, playing cards, and several books, one being Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places. Shore, an American in photographer born in 1947, started a decade-long journey documenting his road trips across North America in 1972. Using an 8×10 view camera, he explored the changing culture of America, the vernacular landscape, empty streets and facades, intimate interiors, and people. Uncommon Places influenced countless photographers over the past 34 years, myself included.
I spent the summer of 2010 absorbed in this book. Going a little stir crazy in my cabin, I decided to go for a drive and stumbled upon Mexico, Maine, a town Shore photographed in 1974. This prompted a new journey as I sought to locate and re-photograph all of Shore’s locations from Uncommon Places. So far, I have re-photographed all of the New England locations. My husband and I spent our honeymoon traveling across country in 2011, photographing in North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. This past summer I spent 3-weeks on the road across American and most of Canada documenting another 27 locations.
Seeking out and re-photographing these iconic images four decades later, I hope echo and complicate Shore’s original evocations of changing culture, landscape, politics, and economy in North America. I am interested in the changes that have occured across many communities and the way things have changed–or not–architecturally, culturally, and politically. What has changed over the past 40 years in a small industrial town like Greenfield, Massachusetts? What stories have been told over the past four decades in Post Falls, Idaho? I hope to raise many questions such as these and make photographs that offer the visual pleasure of looking as well as provide a way of seeing objective change.
For more, see Brittany Marcoux’s work at the exhibition 2017 Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellows in Photography and Sculpture/Installation/New Genres.
New Art Center
61 Washington Park, Newtonville
2017 Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellows Invitational
Photography, Sculpture/Installation/New Genres
Opening Reception: Friday, October 27, 6-8PM
Exhibition Dates: October 27 – December 2, 2017
Gallery Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 1PM-6PM, and by appointment.
The exhibition is free, open to the public and accessible to all.
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