Selected press The New York Times Weekend: Art Guide Friday, October 18, 2003 Melville McLean, “Northeast by Southwest,” Alexandre Gallery, 41 East 57th Street, (212) 755-2828 (through Oct. 26). Mr. McLean’s large photographs of wilderness scenes in Maine, Canada, and Nevada are supernaturally beautiful. He shoots rocky coasts, glassy lakes and extraordinarily colored desert topography using conventional 4-by-5-inch film, but he digitally scans and laser-prints the image, producing pictures of intensely saturated color and hallucinogenic clarity. (Johnson) The Art Newspaper October 2002, No. 129 “Melville McLean: Recent Photographs: Northeast by Southwest, Alexandre Gallery” Sarah Douglas Melville McLean’s lush colour landscape photographs, of coastal Canada, inland Maine, and the Nevada desert are meticulously composed, tending to prompt detailed formal analyses (Aprile Gallant’s catalogue essay explains: “The rock in the lower right corner anchors the composition, leading in a sweeping diagonal that intersects with the round patch of ice in the mid-ground…” and so on). Ms. Gallant writes that McLean’s photographs embody two aspects of art history: the sweeping vistas of 19th-century landscape painting meet the formal rigour of 20th-century abstraction. Perhaps most appealingly, McLean’s is a grounded vision: presented with a mountain, he forcuses on the earth from which it rises, drawing our eye to a patch of scrub. Note to purists: these photographs are tweaked on the computer, hence their super-sharp look. McLean finds eye-pleasing order in nature’s chaos. Widely shown in his home State of Maine, this is his second solo New York show and his first with Alexandre Gallery (until 29 October). The New York Observer Currently Hanging: October 14, 2002 “Focusing on Nature’s Sweep: Vast Images of No Man’s Land” Mario Naves In his review of Winogrand 1964, an exhibition currently at the International Center of Photography, Daniel Kunitz, art critic for The New York Sun, wrote that “given enough rolls of film and enough time, almost anyone could come up with a handful of great shots.” Mr. Kunitz qualifies his remark with a strategic “almost,” thereby making the distinction between Walker Evans and my Aunt Ethel. That photographers have the ability to cull hits and discard a preponderance of misses is a fact that a lot of artists—painters especially—use in arguing for the medium’s status as a lesser art. I’m not about to open that can of worms here. Suffice it to say that there are days when I believe it’s a lesser art and days when I don’t. One of the “don’t” days occurred when I visited the Alexandre Gallery, which is hosting an exhibition of photographs by Melville McLean. To describe Mr. McLean’s photographs of the coastline of Maine and the deserts of Nevada as beautiful pictures of beautiful places won’t do; it makes them sound like postcards. What distinguishes his work isn’t its size (big) or the context in which it’s seen (a 57th Street gallery), but the way in which it amplifies the experience of looking. Though he takes in traces of man’s presence—beehive boxes, running fences—Mr. McLean’s photographs are notably devoid of human figures. They are, almost literally, pictures of no man’s land. The all-over concentration Mr. McLean brings to the particulars of each landscape makes for an almost unbearable clarity; it requires us to fathom nature’s sweep in a way we’re not accustomed to—one bit at a time, all the time. This approach starkly underscores our separation from the landscape and makes it otherworldly and distant. Codroy Pond can be found in Newfoundland, but seen through Mr. McLean’s lens, it may as well be in Oz. The human presence in Mr. McLean’s photographs turns out to be our own. His art rebounds back onto the viewer and makes us aware of our status as onlookers. I don’t approve of this tactic; art should be something we get lost in, not knock our heads against. But Mr. McLean makes self-consciousness exhilarating—and not a little demanding. His photographs, with their brusque compositions, vivid colors and unremitting focus, make no allowances for wandering attention; they’re like magnets for the eye. Only artists make the extraordinary even more so. Aunt Ethel can’t do it. Mr. McLean can—and does. back