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Yost Gallery to Feature ‘Hero City,’ Work by Meghan Kirkwood from November 8 through December 9
published November 8, 2019HIGHLAND, KS - Yost Gallery, located on the main campus of Highland Community College in Highland, KS, will show photography by Meghan Kirkwood from November 8 until December 9. Works include silver gelatin photographs are part of a documentary project begun in 2007 and continued again in 2017 about modern Mongolia and its capital city, Ulaanbaatar. The series title “Hero City,” makes reference to the chosen name for the urban center before pressure from soviet activists led to the renaming of the city as it is known today, Ulaanbaatar (city of the Red Hero).
Kirkwood writes, “my images seek to capture these tensions, while at the same time drawing attention to the rich and thriving culture that animates this young Asian nation. As an outsider, I aimed to photograph places of interaction, crossroads in the city, and individuals at work at a key period in the nation’s history, rather than attempt to relay comprehensive narrative.”
Meghan Kirkwood is an assistant professor of art at North Dakota State. She earned a B.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design in photography in 2006 before completing her M.F.A. in studio art at Tulane University in 2009. She has received numerous fellowships, including funding to participate in artist residencies through the National Parks Service, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Lakeside Lab (Iowa). Kirkwood’s photography has been exhibited throughout the United States, Europe, and South Africa.
Kirkwood’s photography interests range in scope from individual relationships to national histories to proposals for a landscape photography representative of Aldo Leopold’s “land aesthetic.” Her experiments with landscape images and research into the history of the genre represent a long-term interest in the ways artistic representations of land help generate and sustain values and attitudes toward the natural environment.
In tandem with her studio practice, Kirkwood also researches in the fields of African art and the history of photography. She holds an MA in Art History from the University of Kansas, where she researched African monuments designed and built by North Koreans, and a PhD in Art History from the University of Florida. Her dissertation examines the uses of landscape imagery by contemporary South African photographers.
A native New Englander, Kirkwood has lived and worked in various states in the South and Midwest. She has also lived abroad for extended periods in Argentina, Germany, and South Africa. When not photographing or traveling, Kirkwood trains for and competes in marathons.
The Yost Gallery on the Highland campus is open to the community Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. with no admission fee.
