- Visual Arts
- Faculty & Staff
- Courses
- Calendar of Events
- Visiting Artists
- Faculty Gallery
- Student Gallery
- Art Studios
- Visual Arts Alumni
- Department Handbook
- Portfolio Review
- Photographing Works of Art
Related Bowdoin Sites
Meggan Gould
click the images for larger versions of the artwork and details
Use the N and P keys on your keyboard to view the Next and Previous photos
My recent photographic work addresses my interest in landscape visualization in terms of the mutability of mundane surfaces, both public and private. Photographs of computer desktop backgrounds hesitate between photographic conventions of landscape and portrait. As the former, they represent the landscapes, or environments, which we build for ourselves, pixel portals into the familiar spaces within which we pass hour upon hour. Care and attention is invariably spent on personalizing these desktops—photographs of physical landscapes or family members replace, or complement, those that might be tacked on a wall behind a material desk. Some exhibit chaotic clutter with myriad icons, folders, and documents strewn about the surface, while others are tidied and orderly. These images become portraits of their owners, as well as landscapes of our mediated lives.
A second recent arena of exploration into framed, mutable, and mundane landscapes involves the palimpsest of the blackboard. As with the computer screenshots, I find myself drawn to these surfaces as further sites of unexplored vision. Ostensibly worthy of sight only in the context of intermittent chalked messages, what can photographic attention reveal within these monochrome surfaces, in the spaces in-between?
My most recent work, Verso, looks to probe the tension between what conventionally constitutes a picture space and the underlying factors, textual or otherwise, that work to reinforce and define that space. These stark images allow the viewer to glimpse only the backs of photographs—gleaned from my family’s visual history as well as from anonymous, found photographic collections. Hints of text, stamped numbers, tape and glue marks—all relics of a pre-pixel age—invite the viewer to construct their own photographic image on an imagined reverse side.