Scott McFarland

Scott McFarland’s work disrupts the traditional concept of the photograph as the depiction of a single moment in time. He combines multiple photographs of the same scene made at the precise time of day over the course of several weeks. Hill Garden Pergola at Inverforth House is comprised of imagery from three different gardens in Los Angeles and Vancouver, resulting in an elaborate composite of multiple negatives and representing a landscape with a durational quality that stitches together a series of exposures. McFarland’s works, whether seamlessly coherent or collage-like, interrogate our tacit acceptance of the pre-digital photograph as a faithful representation of a single moment and instead conveys the accumulation of experience. This pictorial conception was spurred by the artist’s own consideration of the garden as an artificial environment, one constructed from flora displaced from their native origins and reconfigured in unnatural, aestheticized forms.

Scott McFarland completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia (1997). Select exhibitions have been held at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada (2009), Regen Projects, Los Angeles, (2005, 2007, 2009, 2014), the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2012), and the Musuem of Modern Art, NY (2006). His work is included in the permanent collections of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, the Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo, NY, Centro de Arte de Salamanca, Spain, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others.

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Text © Museum of Contemporary Photography, 2018