Katie McGowan
Katie McGowan is a photographer and designer living and working in Detroit while pursuing an MFA from Cranbrook Art. Working with the tradition of large format imaging, she mediates landscape with an eye to the ephemeral and spiritual. Influenced primarily by her split childhood between Texas and California, her practice revolves around political polarization within the United States and how it affects dialogues between residents across local borders.
No Vacancy
My photographs document the most liberal and conservative of states. Thinking through political issues that are crafted with state lines, gerrymandering, and relativity to the Mason Dixon Line, I use landscape as a means of making connections across these abstract borders and their accompanying political and cultural ideologies. Singularities fade across the wide-open spaces of America, and each territory cedes its cultural identity for continental continuity. Emptiness and human influence inform fields of grain, connecting east and west, north to south. These fields challenge how we think about our neighbors across borders of all kinds and redefine divisions of America.