'Equivalence' Photography Exhibition on Display Through June 3 in Vol Walker Hall

Photos by Phoebe Lickwar and Katya Crawford

These images are among about 350 photographs included in the "Equivalence" exhibition, which is on display April 11 through June 3 in the Fred and Mary Smith Exhibition Gallery, in Vol Walker Hall.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — "Equivalence," an exhibition of about 350 photographs, is on display today, April 11, through June 3 in the Fred and Mary Smith Exhibition Gallery in Vol Walker Hall at the University of Arkansas.

The exhibition is presented by the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design.

An opening reception will be held at 4:30 p.m. today. Admission to the exhibition is free. The exhibition gallery is located on the first floor of Vol Walker Hall, and it is open to the public from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays.

These photographs were taken by Phoebe Lickwar, assistant professor of landscape architecture in the Fay Jones School, and Katya Crawford, associate professor in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of New Mexico.

This collection of images considers the diverse ecology and impermanent nature of ground and sky. The work joins the conversation started by activists (the Situationists), artists (Richard Long) and landscape architects (Vogt Landscape Architects), employing walking as a critical practice, a means to develop knowledge about our constructed environments.

Lickwar and Crawford bring the practice into the 21st century through the lens of the iPhone. Photographs made over a period of two years, in cities across the United States and Europe, reveal a world of materiality, color, microclimate and habitat, a convergence of natural and built systems unfolding in time. 

The professors captured these images with their iPhone cameras face down and face up – focusing only on the ground and the sky. The images – all squares – will be displayed on five walls of the gallery. Smaller, uniform-sized images showing the ground will be placed in rows stacked three high, running about eye level. Above those rows, bigger and varying sizes of sky images will be displayed.

This exhibition was shown at the University of New Mexico earlier this spring, where it was displayed in a different configuration than what is displayed in the gallery here.

Lickwar and Crawford are both interested in issues surrounding landscape literacy, and the use of photography to gain landscape literacy. They presented work done with students at a conference in Vancouver, Canada, and that's where this photo project idea began.

The images included here were taken in the photographers' hometowns – Fayetteville and Albuquerque – and places they've traveled, such as Austin, Pittsburgh, New York, Denver and San Francisco. Vancouver and Copenhagen are the farthest-flung locales represented.

As they collected these images, they initially weren't looking for anything in particular and didn't carry preconceived ideas.

"We were more just interested in what was there," Lickwar said. "But then, we started to notice there were certain categories of things that we were interested in."

They made a short film about their collection, and they categorized the images as artifacts, markings, infrastructure, living matter and paving.

"We were definitely guided by our professions — that we're landscape architects and designers — so we kind of see through that lens," she said.

In this work, they particularly noticed patterns and modifications of patterns — "the way that humans, nonhuman beings and natural forces then act upon those patterns," Lickwar said.

These intensely focused perspectives show evidence of humans marking the surface of the ground, how ants have created colonies in the sand joints of paving and the erosive forces of wind and water.

"I think our hope is that people will become more aware of their built environments and be inspired to look themselves, and to realize that the qualities of the ground and the conditions of weather are part of what make the unique character of the place where they live," she said. "And to remember that things are not static."