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Cedar Wash

Bremner Benedict
Cedar Wash
From the series Gridlines
2002
Pigment print
30 x 30 inches
Courtesy of the artist
© Bremner Benedict

Have you ever tried to take a photograph and felt frustrated that power lines or other industrial structures were intruding on the view? Bremner Benedict doesn’t shift her camera away from utility poles or electrical towers because she wants us to look right at them instead of looking past them.

Noticing these man-made additions to the natural landscape during her travels around the country, Benedict became interested in the strong visual presence in the landscape of power lines and the pylons that hold them aloft. She started photographing these structures and the variety of forms they take, each designed to suit a particular function. Her series Gridlines addresses their often-ignored presence in our lives and our ambiguous relationship to them. “I want to encourage dialog about the dissonance between what we perceive of as beautiful and what we think of as ugly as well as the conflict between the desire for pristine nature and physical comforts that industrial structures produce,” she writes.