FOR ART’S SAKE | december 2009



LIBBIE MASTERSON

A painter by trade, native Houstonian Libbie Masterson took a trip to Iceland several years back and just happened to bring her camera. After shooting the landscape there piqued her interest, she ran with it, and pursued photography as another of her art forms. Several icy landscapes later, she finally ended up shooting right here in her home state.


Your photographic work in its earliest stages has been focused on the colder climates of the globe. Was that a response to growing up in all the Texas heat?
I don’t know. Maybe it’s sort of a little bit because you know, there’s always that fascination with something that’s still new to you. But it has more to do with the light in those places. Because when you spend time in places like Norway and then places like Iceland and Alaska or, to the other extreme in the south – Antarctica – any polar extreme, the light is very different than it is here. I think that may have been my strongest draw initially – the strangeness and the drama of the landscapes in those places.

The grant you got for the West Texas project – did that come with any sort of precursor like ‘OK, your work is great, but you gotta shoot Texas’?
No! Actually, I wanted to do something local because… well, for two reasons. One… I just think it’s important to recognize your own terrain, and sometimes people think that you have to go all the way to Antarctica to see something that’s so different and so strange, and here it’s our own state in West Texas and… maybe it’s drawn a little bit out of the questions that people ask me. People from other places start to ask me what Texas is like and you know it just never ceases to amaze me when I get the ‘do you have an oil well,’ ‘do you ride a horse…’

‘Can you say ‘ya’ll’ for me?’
Oh yeah. I hear it all. Absolutely. I love the landscapes here and West Texas and South Texas and even in the Central… in the Hill Country in Texas, you still find really far out and bizarre landscapes just really close to home.

I was gonna say… temperatures aside, you think about the landscape in West Texas and some of the polar regions you’ve been shooting, and you can draw a correlation between them. Those big, empty skies…
Absolutely. And especially in Iceland. I have some photographs I’ve taken in Iceland that look very much like the photographs that I’ve taken in West Texas. Especially when I photograph in the evening, and the shapes and the structures of the landscape become more of a silhouette and there’s less color involved. I also think it was kind of important considering that this grant was coming from local tax money, that I wanted to honor that, and involve the local terrain. The idea is we’re supposed to be providing something to people that are touring here, and coming to stay in Houston for some purpose or other. So I wanted to kind of touch on that and address that aspect because I feel very lucky to have been given the grant in the first place and

I’m also trying to create some things that allow me to reach out to students in the area and I just think it’s a good practice – trying to reciprocate a little bit.

Where all are you shooting out there? I’ve always understood that one of the darkest regions of the United States is out there.
It could be, it could be. Where I’m shooting in Big Bend is pretty dark. There’s not a whole lot of interference because there just aren’t any towns. And there are some smaller areas that are growing, like Marfa – it’s just fantastic from what’s going on – and it’s not too far from the McDonald Observatory, which was situated right there because of the lack of interference. When I went to see the McDonald Observatory, I could see the rings of Saturn. I mean it was just incredible. I’d like to hook my camera up to that telescope!

How do you switch back and forth between projects? I know you did the set design for the Mozart show at the Miller Outdoor Theater and then you’ve got something like this – I can’t imagine them being more different in so many respects.
Well, they’re different in what the subject matter is, but in the practice of making them, it’s all about creating an environment that someone can really experience, and I guess ultimately that’s my goal. I started, like, when I was in college, doing installations with fiber optics and flashlights and glass… and I would make these dark rooms that people could go into – and gradually, so your eyes adjust, so you don’t just stumble in blindly – you could just walk into and just kind of be removed from whatever you have going on in your mind, and just step into something else. So, installations are really sort of like stage sets that you can walk into instead of a picture that you’re looking at.

Do you think that the landscape will ever become a lost art, or do you think that it will always persevere?
No, I think it will always persevere. I think it’s just natural. It’s in front of us, we live it, we’re looking at it, we fight over it… boy, do we fight over it! We’ve always fought over it and we will probably always be fighting over it. I just think it’s a natural fascination.

If it’s worth fighting over, it’s worth documenting, right?
Heck yeah! Absolutely. And also … it just never gets boring. It’s like a never-ending subject. It’s timeless, it has nothing to do with – well, I guess it can, if you’re taking a political approach to what’s happening with certain areas of the landscape – but in general, it is an unending subject.

Libbie’s collection of West Texas landscapes, entitled “STILL,” opens Thursday, December 10, at Space 125 Gallery at Houston Arts Alliance, 3201 Allen Parkway, 6pm-8pm.

www.libbiemasterson.com

Interview by Lance Scott Walker
Photography by Cody Bess
Assisted by Ryan Booth