Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Mining exhibition explores industry, land and people

Show gives local and global view


By SABINA DANA PLASSE
Express Staff Writer

“Three Coal Miners, India, 1989” photograph at the Sun Valley Center for the Arts in Ketchum. Photo by Sebastião Salgado

Mining has long been a controversial subject. In recent decades, the volatile politics surrounding mining have further divided people over scarred landscape and health problems for workers and surrounding residents.

The Sun Valley Center for the Arts will debut its exhibition "Prospects: An Exploration of Mining" on Friday, Oct. 9, with an opening-night party during Gallery Walk from 5-8 p.m. The multidisciplinary exhibition will continue through Friday, Dec. 11, and will include lectures, films, workshops and a local mining trip.

A companion exhibition at The Center in Hailey, which has already opened, features historic mining photographs from the Idaho State Historical Society and the Hailey Public Library's Martyn Mallory Collection. The exhibition will continue through Friday, Nov. 27.

The mining show will feature images from Alfredo Jaar's "Gold in the Morning," a film and photographic project that documents the manual labor of thousands of pit miners in Brazil. Also on exhibit will be Sebastião Salgado's riveting photographs of Serra Pelada, once the largest open gold mine in the world.

The show will include a large painting by Jennilie Brewster based on a visit to Wyoming's Black Thunder Mine and Victoria Sambunaris' aerial photographs of mines in the eastern and western U.S.

Also featured will be Andre Yi's paintings of abandoned buildings at 19th-century mines in the American West. In addition, the show will have an installation of photos, "Daybreak" by Lucy Raven. The photographs explore the story behind Daybreak, Utah, a town next to the Bingham Mine, a copper mine still in operation.

Another part of the show will feature film and video artist Valerie Sullivan Fuchs, who has created an installation consisting of solar-powered light boxes and digital thermal prints all featuring aerial images of the Appalachian Mountains that show the results of mountaintop removal mining. These images will be mounted around the city of Ketchum.

For details, visit sunvalleycenter.org or call 726-9491.




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