After a move to Montana in the 1980s, Shore began familiarizing himself with the surrounding land before creating images that illuminate the material difference between land and sky. Forty years later, in the height of the pandemic, Shore returned to a consideration of the Montana landscape, taking advantage of the technological possibilities of a drone-mounted camera to present a new perspectival approach to photographing the land. From this vantage point, Shore reveals the friction of distinct adjacencies found in the American West, where the natural world meets the impact of human presence. These images demonstrate the idiosyncratic relationships, compositional complexity, and revelatory moments of beauty in land altered by humans and industry.

This exhibition is part of Tinworks Art’s 2024 exhibition season, The Lay of the Land, featuring a major new ecological artwork by Agnes Denes and work by five artists inspired by the land of the American West.

With an intergenerational mix of established and emerging artists, iconic work and newly commissioned installations, The Lay of the Land explores how land in the west is represented. The artworks included connect to land and place through their physical materiality—wheat, sediment, soot, clay, the sound of passing trains—and subject matter—the natural or industrial forces that have shaped the land of the west and depictions of western places shaped by memory or technology.

Stephen Shore's work has been widely published and exhibited for the past forty-five years. He was the first living photographer to have a one-man show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since Alfred Stieglitz, forty years earlier. He has also had one-man shows at George Eastman House, Rochester; Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Jeu de Paume, Paris; and Art Institute of Chicago. In 2017, the Museum of Modern Art opened a major retrospective of his work. Shore has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His series of exhibitions at Light Gallery in New York in the early 1970s sparked new interest in color photography and in the use of the view camera for documentary work.