Vanishing Points - Hardcover

by Michael Sherwin (Photographer), Michael Sherwin (Author), Elana Schlenker (Designed by)

In Vanishing Points, Michael Sherwin locates and photographs significant sites of indigenous American presence, including sacred landforms, earthworks, documented archaeological sites and contested battlegrounds. The sites he chooses to visit are literal and metaphorical vanishing points. They are places in the landscape where two lines, or cultures, converge. They are also actual archaeological sites where the sparse evidence of a culture's once vibrant existence has all but disappeared. While visiting these sites, Sherwin reflects on the monuments modern culture will leave behind and what the archaeological evidence of our civilization will reveal about our time on Earth.

Author Biography

Michael Sherwin is a multimedia artist exploring scientific, cultural and historical interpretations of the natural world. He has won numerous grants and awards for his work and has exhibited and lectured widely. Select images from his Vanishing Points project have been featured in exhibitions at the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center, Morris Museum of Art, Huntington Museum of Art, and the Center for Fine Art Photography among others. Solo exhibitions of the work have been shown at galleries in Binghamton, NY, Nashville, TN and Lincoln, NE. The project has also been publicized widely, including essays, reviews and features in Don't Take Pictures magazine, Aint-Bad Magazine, Light Leaked, Fototazo, Oxford American's "Eyes on the South", Prism magazine, Looking at Appalachia, Humble Arts Foundation, Medium's Vantage and on National Public Radio. The project was also chosen as a Finalist in Photolucida's Critical Mass competition and included in Duke University's Archive of Documentary Arts in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library. In 2017, Michael was selected for the Snowshoe Institute Award of Excellence for Scholarship in the Arts, an annual award given to one faculty member in the entire College of Creative Arts at West Virginia University to recognize outstanding research and scholarship contributions. Currently, Michael is in the early stages of book design, with intentions of publishing his first monograph on the Vanishing Points project in the coming year. Sherwin earned an MFA from the University of Oregon in 2004, and a BFA from The Ohio State University in 1999. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of Art in the School of Art and Design at West Virginia University.