Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Photography
Website: sean-mcfarland.com
Sean McFarland was born in 1976 in California and has spent most of his career in the San Francisco Bay Area. He received a BS from Humboldt State University in 2002 and an MFA from the California College of the Arts in Oakland in 2004. He teaches art at San Francisco State University and is represented by Casemore Kirkeby Gallery in San Francisco. His awards include the 2017 SECA Art Award from SFMOMA, a 2011 Eureka Fellowship, the 2009 Baum Award for an Emerging American Photographer, and the 2009 John Guttmann Photography Fellowship.
McFarland's photographs explore the relationship between image-making, the representation of landscape, and the long history of photography in the American West. Working with Polaroid, cyanotypes, photograms, double exposures, prismatic glass filters, and digital manipulation, he creates images that are at once convincing and impossible — mountains built from chips of glass, moons made from bottle caps. The work asks viewers to examine how their experiences of the natural world are always already mediated by images. He also makes graphite drawings based on his photographs, deliberately including the photograph's borders and edges in the re-renderings.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your own profile.