VES 41b: Photographic Inquiry

“Moon Studies and Star Scratches No. 14,” July 1–7, 2006, Middlesex, Vermont, 4 hour exposure; 35, 10, 1 minute exposures; 20, 15, 20 second exposures. Type-C print from 4 x 5 transparency, 50 x 40 in.

Harper received an MFA in photography and related media from the School of Visual Art in New York in 1997 and a BA from Middlebury College in literary studies. She works with photography and video to record a subjective experience of landscape, exploring ways that technology mediates our relationship with the natural world and generates perceptual experiences. Her work was the subject of a solo exhibition, Sharon Harper: Photographs from the Floating World, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2001. She has had solo exhibitions at Marcel Sitcoske Gallery in San Francisco; Savage Art Resources in Portland, Oregon; and the Goethe Institute in New York. Her work was included in the Greater New York exhibition at PS1 Contemporary Art Center in February 2000; On Site, Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College; Walk Ways, a traveling exhibition sponsored by Independent Curators International; Sublime Metaphor, Oxford University Museum of Natural History; Celestial, Work Space Gallery, New York; Art on Paper, Weatherspoon Art Museum, at the University of North Carolina; and Summertime, smART gallery in Munich. Harper’s work is in permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art; Portland Art Museum; and Bayerische Vereinsbank. She was an artist-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California, in 2002 and she has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Ucross Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She received a Meredith S. Moody Residency Fellowship at Yaddo, the Sam and Dusty Boynton Residency Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center, and a Film Study Center Fellowship at Harvard University in 2006.