Down on the farm

Susan Bowen imparts NYC sensibilities on Iowa landscapes

BY KELLE SCHILLACI

Susan Bowen is dead set on proving that while you can take the New Yorker to the farm, she's still, well, a New Yorker. In her exhibit "Iowa Meanderings" at CCSN, the NYC-based photographer explores the back-roads, junkyards and industrial underbelly of the vast Midwest farmlands. It's vastly different subject material than she finds on the streets of Manhattan, but Bowen's energetic style brings as much life to hay wheels and tillers as she does to bustling street crowds. In so doing, Bowen reveals more about her own personality than the place upon which she actually settles her lens.

"Having discovered the capability to easily combine skads of pictures into one experience allows me to be interested in photography again," Bowen explains of her panoramic photographic technique, accomplished via the use of a Holga camera. "I also think the multiple exposures give a more full interpretation of my experience of a particular 'moment' in time."

While Bowen does fiddle with final color tones, the shots themselves are not digitally altered. The overlap comes from within the lens itself, a quirk of the Holga camera. Rather than overcompensate for its tricky film advance mechanism, Bowen embraces the quirk, employing a partial advance that allows several images to overlap into explosions of energetic motion, often producing surprising, surrealistic results.

The Holga trend isn't new, especially in the "low tech" art scene. The camera offers obvious advantages. First off, it's super cheap. Top-of-the line models cap off at around $30, with most falling in the $20 range. It's lightweight and portable, and it offers something unique in its final product: the element of chance.

Chance -- in the form of an open artist call -- is also what inspired Bowen's visit to Iowa. Bowen's previous subject matter included mostly NYC-based anti-war and anti-Bush protests, street fairs, pride parades, and subway commuters. Bowen didn't land the public art grant, but she did score a fascinating series that traces Iowa's vast farmland, equipment and industry.

"Farm and Hay" marks the most expected Iowa shot: towering rolls of dried hay, a still tractor, the red-washed barn. It's the most cliché of the bunch, but still hints at untold stories. Drop a city girl in a rural setting, and it's only a matter of time before she goes straight for the manmade items. "Alter of Rust" reads as a paean to junk, featuring piles of rusty but brightly illuminated car parts.

Interconnected strips of urban asphalt are replaced by twists of thick pipe tubing in "Sea of Snakes." "Blue Industrial" and "John Deere Lot" bring heavy industrial and farm machinery to life with eerie results. "Field Silhouettes" contains a field of sharp-toothed farm equipment moonlighting as an eerie, outdoor torture chamber.

Once the shots are taken and scanned, the artist is free to manipulate them.

"There is a lot of craft involved in the extensive tonal and color corrections," explained the artist. "And I practice some artistic license in beefing up the colors or editing out distracting details."

The obsessive nature of Bowen's immaculate crafting results in slick, highly stylized works that present an often ethereal examination of even the most mundane landscapes -- while imparting hefty portions of the artist's own quirky personality.

Meanwhile, as CCSN hosts an imported New York artist, the work of several prominent Vegas artists has been exported north as part of the "2005 Nevada Triennial" at Reno's Nevada Museum of Art. Mark Brandvik, Samuel Davis, Tom Holder, Danielle Kelly, Darius Kuzmickas and Julie Madden round out a far larger list of juried artists in an exhibit that also includes a series of "Art Bite" dialogues. The show runs through September, should your summer travels lead northbound.

Iowa Meanderings: Works by Susan Bowen

Through Aug. 1

CCSN Fine Arts Gallery

3200 E. Cheyenne Ave.

651-4205

Free