Wild Edges: Photographic Ink Prints by Gregory Conniff (Chazen Museum of Art Catalogs) Conniff, Gregory and Panczenko, Russell

     Gregory Conniff's large-scale black and white pastoral images evoke the sensuality of nineteenth century photographic materials. In his affectionate and intelligent work, there is a visible connection to the history of landscape art, reaching back as far as Claude Lorrain and seventeenth-century Dutch drawing. Conniff is also a leading practitioner of a new pastoralism that is casting a contemporary eye on the current state of America's open land. Postmodern in the best sense, Conniff's pictures address the timeless human need to see beauty in the world that shapes our lives. A resident of Wisconsin for more than thirty years, Conniff has focused much of his artistic energy on the rural Midwest, exploring the interdependent relationship between land and people. For the past fifteen years, Conniff has also been making pictures of rural Mississippi, again focusing on elements of the landscape that resonate with a universal sense of aesthetic familiarity. As he explains, "I am interested in work that defines and protects the vanishing, commonplace beauties that let us know we're home."

Gregory Connif is an artist whose work is included in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Center for Creative Photography in Arizona, among others. He resides in Madison, Wisconsin.