Contact: Maridith Geuder
Michael Berk's MSU exhibition includes this short-range image taken at Canyon de Chelly in Arizona.
An exhibition at Mississippi State University through April 3 highlights in a unique way the ancestral Navajo Nation and Southwestern native architecture.
Featuring work by associate architecture professor Michael A. Berk, the collection--titled "4@4 Corners"--is featured 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Friday on the second floor of Giles Hall in the School of Architecture gallery.
While intended as art--selections are signed and a limited number will be officially reproduced in the future--the display illustrates a research technique Berk calls "photo-analytique mapping"--a merger of traditional mapping technologies with photographic art.
The exhibit specifically focuses on ancestral Puebloan architecture, as well as significant archaeological sites in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and the Navajo Nation of Arizona. In viewing the special large format maps, viewers will find themselves located both in time and space at sites Berk researched during a recent sabbatical from his university teaching duties.
"Basically, this technique carefully embeds scientific data into beautiful photographic compositions," Berk said. The display should be of special interest to scholars in archaeology, architecture, landscape architecture, graphic design, and urban design, as well as those with a specialty in geographic information systems and scientific visualization, he added.
Berk said the images draw on U.S. Geological Survey aerial photography and maps, NASA photography, and his own original black-and-white photographs and panoramic shots.
"The technique allows the viewer to spatially understand a 'thing' from multiple scales of view," he explained. "The plates organize scientific data so that it does not get in the way of the image, but it is there to be extracted."
Berk's project was funded, in part, by the MSU Humanities and Arts Research Program and Office of the Dean of Architecture.
For more information on the exhibit, telephone (662) 325-2202.