ESCANABA — Bay College announces the exhibition and reception for Surface Tension, photography by Terri Warpinski. Please join us in the Besse Gallery on Tuesday, Sept. 3, at 2 p.m. for a Reception and Artist Talk. The exhibition will be on display until Sept. 18.

Terri Warpinski, professor of art emerita at the University of Oregon, began her teaching career in 1983 at the University of Florida. She received her B.A. in Humanistic Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, and has an M.A. and M.F.A. in Photography from the University of Iowa. She was distinguished as a Fulbright Scholar in Israel in 2000- 2001, was a visiting professor at New Mexico State University in 2009. In 2014 she was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Oregon Art Commission, and in 2013 and 2016 Career Opportunity Grants through the Ford Family Foundation and Oregon Arts Commission. Most recently she was a recipient of a DAAD Research Grant (2017) to Berlin working with and hosted by the Stiftung Berliner Mauer.

Her work has been shown internationally in more than a hundred exhibitions, at such venues as the Pingyao International Festival of Photography in China; the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem; Houston International Fotofest; the Center for Photography in Woodstock, New York; the University of the Arts in Philadelphia; and Camerawork in San Francisco. She has been awarded artist residencies at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, Playa in Oregon, Scuola Internazionale di Graphica in Venice, Annex:Art in Berlin, and Caldera in Oregon.

Her border-based landscape work was featured in the Spring 2014 issue of the Society for Photographic Education’s journal Exposure with an essay “Insecure Borders: Terri’s Warpinski’s Surface Tension” written by Katherine Ware, Curator, New Mexico Museum of Art. A solo exhibition of Surface Tension has been touring since the 2014 with venues in Colorado, Arizona, Oregon, Nebraska, Illinois, New Mexico, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and New York.

Artist Statement:

Surface Tension examines landscape as a remnant trace of socio-cultural interaction. In three geographies – the US-Mexico borderland, the Israeli-Palestinian separation barrier along the Green Line, and the trace of the former wall throughout present day Berlin — landscapes have been, and, are actively being repurposed to articulate division and reunification. The three locations presented in this long-term project resist a metaphoric collapse in favor of a parallel reading.

Surface Tension fuses various means for capturing digital images using a combination of high definition digital RAW files, cell phone photographs, and still frames from low-resolution video. As this project evolved I became increasingly interested in the role that photography itself plays as an instrument of power and control in border zones. From the high-powered long-distance surveillance cameras, to drones, to night vision cameras used by citizen vigilantes, everywhere one goes along these borders one is being observed.

Her current work-in-progress, Death|s|trip, was featured in the online blog LENSCRATCH November 25. 2016 [http://lenscratch.com/2016/11/teri-warpinski/]. Further work and full C.V. can be viewed on her website: www.terriwarpinski.com.