Sense of Space / Sense of Place, featuring the art of six contemporary photographers, opens at the Spheris Gallery on Saturday, March 6th with a reception from 6:00 – 8:00 pm and will be on display through Saturday, April 13th. The exhibit features work that captures the aesthetic of unique spaces, imbuing the photographs with a strong sense of place, thereby providing the viewer with a connection to each depicted interior or landscape.

In Nicholas Gaffney’s Sunday series the artist photographed New York City and surrounding areas during the summer of 2008. The series captures the humanity and oddity of day-to-day activity in a city of over 8 million. Gaffney describes this body of work as “his first attempt to treat the city he lived in for thirteen years as a subject.”

Jeffrey Stockbridge’s Devine Lorraine series examines the once luxurious Devine Lorraine Hotel, exposing the subtle beauty of a building in decay and capturing the mystery of abandoned space. Though not always evident in the images, Stockbridge also considers the buildings potential, “Sold in the early 90’s and abandoned for the last 8 years, this beautiful building sits surrounded by fences waiting to resume its original purpose.”

Nicolai Howalt & Trine Sondergaard examine the human relationship to nature in How to Hunt. Taken from a single point of view, their images are layered, providing the viewer with a fixed landscape and fleeting impressions of hunters and the hunted. The resulting surreal imagery greatly serves the artists’ goals: “Hunting today can be seen as a ritualized performance of something that was once a basic human need… We wanted to locate this historical theme in a modern context, where – at least in the affluent post-industrial West – it can be seen as a symbol of ‘the good life’ and the longing for some kind of authentic relationship to nature.”

Elke Morris’s selectively blurred and saturated images of buildings give her Domicile series the trompe l'oeil effect of miniaturization. Though printed large scale, it feels as if one is looking at models. This toy-like nature, enhanced by Morris's use of color, is at odds with her subject matter. Photographs of people's homes connote intimacy and the private sphere, and Morris's child like presentation shifts the viewer from observer to outsider, setting up a psychological push and pull which ultimately engages her audience on a deeper level.

David Westby’s black and white series Winter Trees draws in the viewer with subtle grays and a soft mysterious fog. These images of natural settings are combined with a strikingly modern inclusion of cables, which separate the images from the natural, and implicitly evoke questions around the human effect upon nature. Westby states, “My photographic work begins with my interest in the edges of things. I am fascinated with the states of transition from one domain to another.”