Photo show at Heights Arts travels the landscape

Tophography is a group exhibition of recent photography by five local artists whose work offers personal experiences of landscape. Organized by and showing at Heights Arts, 1275 Lee Road, the show runs March 2 to April 14. Each of the five artists brings a distinctive approach.

Philip Brutz offers stereoscope images made at Raven Rocks in south-central Ohio. Installed in a special viewer that enables visitors to scroll through the photographs, the series explores with 3-D intensity the quiet details of the site. Brutz's photography has appeared in exhibitions at MOCA Cleveland and at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the museum has acquired a number of his photographs for its collection.

G. M. Donley is designer and editor of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s magazine, and a founding member of Heights Arts. His strongly horizontal photographs here combine dozens of overlapping transparent images to create dense collages of 360-degree panoramas, or excursions such as mountain hikes and bicycle rides.

Matthew Fehrmann, an adjunct professor at the Cleveland Institute of Art (CIA), where he is responsible for fine art digital photography and printing courses, is a maker of fine art prints for major photographers. Last year, he and two friends rode motorcycles from Alaska to Mexico, and here he shows images made during that journey. His work has recently been on view at 78th Street Studios in Cleveland.

Nancy McEntee, professor of photography at CIA, is a 2009 recipient of a Creative Workforce Fellowship from the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture. Her photographs are exhibited nationally in many public and private collections. She was awarded a residency at the Burren College of Art in County Clare, Ireland, for summer 2010, and the photographs she presents here portray her daughter—the subject of her ongoing body of work—in the striking Irish landscape.

Michael Weil inspired this exhibition with his series of photographs looking down from a commercial flight. Juxtaposing images of runway tarmac, ex-urban developments, arid mountain ranges, and massive-scale agriculture, the series finds poetic visual rhymes through texture and abstraction. A photohistorian by profession, Weil earned a Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University, and is currently an adjunct professor at CIA.

Tophography opens Friday, March 2, 6–9 p.m. The gallery is Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, 10 a.m.–5 p.m.; Thursday, Friday, 10 a.m.–9:30 p.m.; Saturday 1:30–9:30 p.m., and by appointment. Call 216-371-3457 for information.