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Art professor has solo exhibition at de Young Museum

Assistant professor of art and electronic media Elliot Anderson has a solo exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco that runs through May 20. Titled “Average Landscapes,” the show is part of the de Young’s Connections Gallery series.

Niagara by Elliot Anderson

Anderson’s work examines the relationship between 19th-century American landscape painting and contemporary tourist photography. “Using custom software I search the Internet for images based on titles of paintings by Hudson River School painters — people such as Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, and Thomas Moran,” said Anderson. “The software returns everyday snapshots of the places represented in the paintings. I then average these images together using additional custom software to create a merged image that contains ghosts of all the images collected.”

The exhibition contains 13 large-scale digital transparencies mounted on lightboxes, a series of “souvenir” plates with digital transfers of the landscapes, and video.

The de Young is located at 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.