Making artful aerial photographs of despoiled landscapes is hardly a pathbreaking artistic genre, but damned if Tom McMurray’s color-saturated images of scarred mining landscapes in the sprawling Kimberley and Pilbara regions of Western Australia aren’t gorgeous—guiltily so.
McMurray is based in Boulder, Colorado, but he was part of a team of photographers and filmmakers who helped make the 2015 documentary Keeping Country about industrial threats to Western Australia. His exhibit at Touchstone Gallery, Lines in Country, includes a handful of small portraits of individuals who live there, but the unquestioned stars of the exhibit are the more than a dozen infused-dye sublimation metal prints of heavily abstracted landscapes, captured from a helicopter. They’re visually dazzling—not a disappointing image in the bunch.
The region’s Roebuck Bay Mud Flats, for instance, appear in one image as a slippery-surfaced riot of orange, magenta, blue, and pink; in another, they feature a pyramid of beige sand adjoining a curious striated pattern in blue. In a third image the flats resolve into balanced halves of brown and blue, easily passing for clouds as seen from an airplane.
McMurray’s images of the region’s Dampier Salt Pond are equally impressive. One image channels the paintings of Richard Diebenkorn, with a rigidly geometrical arrangement of mango green-hued water and a diagonal slash featuring ribbons of yellow, orange, green, and white. Another Dampier Salt Pond image captures a citrus backdrop divided by a meandering zigzag of green; a third includes a Barnett Newman–like zip of briny white slashing through an otherworldly landscape of burnt ochre.
With their intense abstraction, the images’ scale is often unclear, only resolving on the occasions when manmade features appear. In one image of a mining operation, the viewer can see a pair of water sprays; they are undoubtedly huge, but in McMurray’s portrayal, the bursts appear to be coming from something no larger than a Water Pik. Of special note are a few images of fractal-like forms—a series of bright green curlicues in a water channel; a deep blue collection of estuary-style rivulets; and an image of the King Sound Tidal Mud Flats with forms that could pass for a dried botanical sample pressed between sheets of antique paper.
Ultimately, some of McMurray’s images are downright mysterious, such as “Crab Creek Waves,” in which a series of thin, well-defined white waves in ocean-blue water churn bafflingly alongside a swath of gentler, brownish-red ripples.
The gallery has smartly paired McMurray’s photographs with a collection of abstract paintings by the photographers’ brother, a D.C.-based artist and a member of Touchstone. In La Côte d’Azur, McCain McMurray’s acrylics on canvas, usually rendered in pastel hues, call to mind the meditative arrangements of Mark Rothko, though others are washes with geometry and more mottling. A series of smaller works with creamy, heavily impastoed, highly tangible surfaces are worthy of a studied gaze.
The setting of McCain’s paintings couldn’t be further from the Western Australia desert: His works in the show were inspired by a residency in the small French town of Vallauris, on the Mediterranean coast near Cannes. But in their shared abstraction and careful attention to color, the brothers’ visual echoes couldn’t be more apparent.
Lines in Country and La Côte d’Azur run through April 28 at Touchstone Gallery; Wednesday through Sunday, noon to 5 p.m. touchstonegallery.com. Free.
