For the month of April, the Baker Gallery in the Walker Fine Arts Center at Woodberry Forest School features work by two Charlottesville-based artists who explore contemporary approaches to landscape and travel photography. The recent images in En Route: Stacey Evans and Pamela Pecchio offer a broader view of our shared American narrative by revealing the beauty of no-man’s-land spaces we pass by in our rush from point A to point B.

Over the past five years, Evans has been creating her TRAINSCAPES by logging hundreds of hours looking out Amtrak train windows. From this unique vantage point she discovered an America hidden from view. Along well-traveled East and West Coast routes, diverse stories and terrains appear in quick succession; industrial parks, abandoned downtowns, suburban back roads, and farm scenery pass by in a blink of an eye. Evans’s selective documentation is very much about time, about capturing beauty in layered planes of contrasting textures. According to the artist, the series exhibits “the atmosphere of varying days and regions, structures found in the built environment, and patterns of nature” and in doing so asks the question: 'How do we exist in relation to the land?'”

As with Evans’s photographs, Pamela Pecchio’s images are informed by being in transit—in her case, by commuting for many years between two cities to teach. Passing through the North Carolina/Virginia landscape Pecchio found expression of her inner tensions, drawn to the tangled kudzu and forest bordering the highway, buffer zones dotted with broken trees and bits of trash. Soon she was pulling off the road with her large-format view camera, taking exposures lasting from a few seconds to twenty minutes to achieve pictures of uncommon clarity and energy. “To me the works are psychological interiors,” says Pecchio “In many ways the images are portraits of me, telling a story of in-between-ness, and that sometimes being trapped can be very peaceful.”

Stacey Evans studied at Virginia Commonwealth University and received her BFA from Savannah College of Art and Design. In 2010 Evans received a Puffin Foundation grant for her TRAINSCAPES project and has exhibited throughout the East Coast, including at Page Bond Gallery, Richmond, VA, and the Savannah College of Art and Design, GA. Based in Charlottesville, Evans teaches at St. Anne’s-Belfield Middle School, Piedmont Virginia Community College, and the University of Virginia Art Museum.

Pamela Pecchio has an MFA in photography from Yale University and a BFA from University of Georgia, Athens. Her work is included in the collections of the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, and the Yale University Art Museum. Pecchio is represented by Daniel Cooney Fine Art in New York and currently is an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

A reception will be held in the Baker Gallery this Thursday, March 31, from 6:00 - 7:30 pm, for Stacey Evans and Pamela Pecchio. There is a gallery talk at 7:00. Please mark this on your calendar. Everyone is cordially invited to attend.

For more information about the work of Stacey Evans and Pamela Pecchio visit http://staceyevansphotography.com/ and http://pamelapecchio.com/home.html respectively.