Artwork copyright Peter de Lory. Photo courtesy of Washington State Arts Commission, 2017.

Artwork copyright Peter de Lory. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Artwork copyright Peter de Lory. Photo courtesy of Washington State Arts Commission, 2017.

Artwork copyright Peter de Lory. Photo courtesy of Washington State Arts Commission, 2017.

In the Spirit of Place, 1992

Peter de Lory
(American, born 1948)

Location: Skagit Valley College, Mount Vernon

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

In the Spirit of Place is a three-part artwork of photographs by artist Peter de Lory. The images highlight the striking lines, shadows, and textures found in the landscape of the American West. They are bold and almost abstract. On the left, de Lory captured the dark silhouette of a mountain and the lines of tracking stars in Death Valley, California using an eight-hour long exposure. In the middle panel, the path of a stone carried by the wind marks a line through the pattern of the cracked, hardened mud ground at Devils Racetrack in Death Valley, California. On the right, textures are highlighted in the stones stacked and mortared against a large, slanted rock face to form a small building at Mesa Verde National Monument in Colorado. (The small stone building was built by the Ancestral Pueblo people during the late 1190s.) De Lory notes, "This piece celebrates the Western Landscape and the mysteries it can present, when one slows down enough to listen to the wind and simply be in the landscape."

This artwork was acquired for the State Art Collection in partnership with Skagit Valley College.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Peter de Lory is a Seattle-based photographer whose work explores the landscape, narratives, and mythologies of the American West. "My work always seems to return to the ways memory and myth overlay reality, a problem perfectly matched with the camera's ability to frame the world."

De Lory received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute and Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Colorado. He served as Director of the Photography Department of the Sun Valley Center for the Arts and Humanities in central Idaho. He has taught photography at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, San Jose State University, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the University of New Mexico. He moved to the Pacific Northwest in 1994.