Alice Shaw: The Exalted Landscape

Alice Shaw: The Exalted Landscape

San Francisco-based artist Alice Shaw has practiced photography for more than twenty-five years. Shaw’s recent work centers around humanity’s conscious effort to be less prone to conquer the environment and more determined to actively preserve the planet’s natural beauty. Inspired by how gold and other precious metals were used in Byzantine art to beautify and revere paintings and icons, Shaw enshrines parts of her black-and-white images with twenty-two karat gold leaf to instill a renewed reverence for nature. 

For The Exalted Landscape, Shaw traveled to new destinations, including the redwood groves in Northern California and Red Rock Canyon in Nevada, to create a series of landscape images that range from coastal and forest regions to the desert in California and Nevada. Shaw photographs in color with a digital camera and later prints the images in black-and-white before applying gold leaf.

Alice Shaw received a BFA and MFA in photography from San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI). Her work can be found in the collections of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the di Rosa Foundation, Napa, California. She was visiting lecturer at University of California, Davis, University of California, Santa Cruz, University of California, Berkeley, San Francisco State University, and California College of Art. She is adjunct faculty at SFAI and Diablo Valley College, Pleasant Hill, California.

©2014 by the San Francisco Airport Commission. All rights reserved.