David Stephenson

Art Brokerage: David Stephenson American Artist: b. 1955. David Stephenson is an American-born photographic and video artist who has lived in Hobart, Australia since 1982. He studied art and art history at the University of Colorado and the University of New Mexico, completing an MFA in 1982, and then moved to Australia that same year to take up a position teaching photography at the University of Tasmania. A fascination for the vast in space and time has led him to travel and photograph extensively around the world, with journeys to Europe, the Himalayas, and both the Arctic and Antarctic. His second visit to Antarctica in 1991 stimulated his first exhibited work in video, which has continued to be an important aspect of his practice.rn rnA meditation on the sublime has guided Stephenson's artistic practice over four decades, which has evolved through long-term, interrelated projects of inquiry. His photographic typologies of the transcendent ceilings of European sacred architecture have been published in two monographs with Princeton Architectural Press, with German editions by Prestel Verlag – Visions of Heaven: The Dome in European Architecture (2005) and Heavenly Vaults: From Romanesque to Gothic in European Architecture (2009).While travelling for these architectural projects Stephenson made his first photographs of cities at night, bringing together a number of his previous interests, including the idea of the sublime, environmental concerns, and the transcendental power of light. The glowing "light city" seems the perfect emblem of so much that is both good and bad in our industrialized culture: an extraordinary example of a monumental technological sublime, where awe, beauty, and human aspiration are tinged with the horror of potential environmental catastrophe, our engine of modernity seemingly running on empty. Listings wanted.