Four contemporary artists working in drawing, painting and photography — including School of Art Professor Ellen McMahon — are part of an exhibition, “Ecotone: Between Nature and Art,” at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum from June 17 to Aug. 13.
An ecotone is a transition zone where ecological systems meet and mingle as they transition from one ecosystem to another.
McMahon has devoted her career to working at the nexus of art and the environment. This exhibit features new works in the ongoing series Distance Passed – Abstract, expressionistic wet-on-wet ink washes are cropped in miniature to provide the illusion of atmospheric mini-landscapes, alluding to horizon lines of distant terrains as they mark the limits of what we can know. Suggesting vast, open expanses under the open sky, as well as the uncanny specifics of remote sites in the West, where she worked as a field biologist, McMahon’s work evokes longing for the stillness and silence in lone encounters with nature.
