Christa Blackwood: Prix West

Christa Blackwood: Prix West by Aline SmithsonJanuary 12, 2016

©Christa Blackwood

For the past several years, photographic artist Christa Blackwood has considered the landscape from a female perspective, combining historical photographic techniques with contemporary conceptual strategies. Her project, Naked Lady: A Dot Red, shifted our focus of attention and enabled a reconsideration of classical subjects.

Crista’s latest project, Prix West, opens as a solo exhibition on January 16 at Photo Methode Gallery at the Flatbed Press Art Complex in Austin, Texas. The exhibition will showcase the last three years of Crista’s figure in the western landscape work, as well as her figurative studio portraiture studies, which play homage to Callahan, Newton, Stieglitz and Weston.

All of the work featured in Prix West was shot using large format view cameras and black and white sheet film and printed in a variety of ways-silver gelatin prints, posters, 20×24 inch photogravures and 32×40 inch archival pigment prints. The opening reception for Prix West is this Saturday, January 16 from 6-8pm. Sam Sebree, one of Blackwood’s primary models/muses will be signing limited edition posters from 7-7:30 pm on opening night. Prix West will be on view until February 28, 2016.

Crista would like to acknowledge the fine folks, particularly Ian Edquist and Rick Daily, in the photo/new media department at Anderson Ranch for their guidance and assistance in printing the 32×40 inch prints during her fall residency.

©Christa Blackwood

Crista Blackwood is an award winning photo, text and installation artist working with themes related to identity, history, and popular culture. Her dream-like images and texts employ multiple techniques and methods, fusing traditional, historical and alternative photographic processes with iPhone image-making and street installations. Blackwood received her MA in Studio Art from New York University and a BA in Classics from The University of Oklahoma. Her work has been featured in several publications including The New York Times, Art Desk Magazine, The Village Voice and The Chicago Sun-Times. She has exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the U.S. and abroad and has most recently been an artist in resident at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Colorado.

©Christa Blackwood

For the last three years, Austin-based artist Christa Blackwood has taken her large-format, film-view cameras & models and has hit the road. Traveling around Texas, and across New Mexico, Colorado and Utah, her work stages the nude male body within the majesty of North America’s gorgeous western landscape, and situates it in a genealogy of classical photographic studies of the human figure.