Richard Buswell: Close to Home, Highlighting Abstract, Landscape Photography

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

The OSU Museum of Art is pleased to introduce Richard Buswell: Close to Home, on view from Feb. 9, 2015 – May 9, 2015, featuring an opening reception and artist talk on March 5 from 5 – 7 pm.

For more than four decades, Richard Buswell has trained his camera on the abandoned and overgrown homesteads and majestic, never-ending skies of his home state of Montana. His black-and-white photographs frame cast-off, common things to reveal abstract patterns in the tradition of twentieth-century modernist photography.

Buswell has photographed Western settlement sites, ghost towns, and frontier homesteads. Throughout his career, he has moved closer to his subject matter, emphasizing things such as corroded artifacts and decayed bones to reveal the ravages of time. His work, which he describes more interpretive and abstract than documentary, often explores the junction where artifacts become visual echoes of the past. Through photographs of eroding structures, Buswell narrates nature’s reclamation of frontier sites.

Richard Buswell: Close to Home represents a new body of his work, and showcases more than 50 photographs. The opening reception at the museum on Thursday, March 5, from 5 – 7 pm is free and open to the public. The reception includes a talk from Buswell at 6 pm.

Buswell has exhibited internationally and is included in the major American collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Corcoran Gallery of Art, the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, Baltimore Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, and more.

Richard Buswell: Close to Home was organized by the Montana Museum of Art & Culture at the University of Montana, Missoula, Montana.