Evans Pond, A long term study of a single place by Deborah Garwood

October 2-November 19, 2006

Deborah Garwood is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York. Her work explores the interdependence of nature and culture. Garwood has exhibited sculpture, installation, photography, video, drawing, intaglio prints, and artist’s books in New York and internationally since 1980.  In 1997, Garwood initiated a project entitled “Evans Pond: A Long-Term Study of a Single Place.”  Bringing a variety of cameras and films to the same site in New Jersey, she has been documenting and interpreting the forest, pond, and an adjacent abandoned orchard for almost 10 years. The archive is a personal reflection on the duration of this forest at the edge of suburbia, and it is also a study of changing photographic tastes and technologies - from early 20th-century box cameras to digital imagery.

Evans Pond reflects the artist’s fascination with the natural world and a desire to befriend this site almost as if it were a person. At the same time, the project synthesizes her research on photography and sculpture. Garwood’s influences range from the eclectic photographs of August Rodin’s sculpture, which she studied in 1993 at the Rodin Museum in Paris, to Minimalist-era sculptors’ use of photography in relation to their presence in the landscape. Her observation of seasonal change at Evans Pond gradually led to an interest in astronomy.  Recently, she earned a certificate in astronomy from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and gained permission to pursue independent research at The Paris Observatory.