David Stephenson: Sun Drawings
Expecting it to return every day, all life on earth relies on our own burning star, as it progressively heats the planet towards what may become an unliveable future. Over the past few years in Tasmania, I have been tracing the daily passage of the sun, and its seasonal movement along the horizon, as it arcs across the sky and etches its image onto my film in exposures ranging from seconds to many hours. Alongside the larger digital inkjet prints of recent projects, in the Sun Drawings series I have also returned to analogue silver prints for their unique qualities.
David Stephenson is an American-born photographic and video artist who has lived in Tasmania, Australia since 1982. He studied art and art history at the University of Colorado and the University of New Mexico from 1973 to 1982. In 1980 he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship that allowed him to spend two months photographing the Alaska Pipeline’s impact on the Arctic wilderness, leading to his completion on a MFA in photography in 1982. He moved to Australia that same year to take up a position teaching photography at the University of Tasmania. A fascination for the vast in space and time has led him to travel and photograph extensively around the world, with journeys to Europe, the Himalayas, and both the Arctic and Antarctic. Stephenson’s second visit to Antarctica in 1991 led to his first exhibited work in video, which has continued to be an important aspect of his practice.
In a career spanning four decades, David Stephenson has produced some of the most powerful photographic images in contemporary art. Stephenson’s ability to capture the vast and terrifying beauty of both our natural and industrial landscapes is unrivalled; rendering his exploration of the cosmological and technological sublime, truly awe-inspiring. From the domes and cupolas of humankind’s greatest architectural achievements, to the infinite stars in the vaulted night sky, Stephenson’s images are humbling and exultant — each a monument to majesty.
Stephenson’s photographs and video have been exhibited extensively internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (1993 and 2017), the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (1994), the Paisley Museum and Art Gallery, Scotland (1995), the National Gallery of Victoria, (1998), the Cleveland Museum of Art (2001), and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (2001 and 2017). His work is represented in many public and private collections including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Queensland Art Gallery, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, the International Museum of Photography and Film at George Eastman House, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
