Dow, Beth

American, b. 1965

BiographyBeth Dow is a Minneapolis-based artist interested in photography’s materiality and how it can function as a mediator of the ways that we experience the world. Her series Prediction Error investigates traditional subjects found within photography and the various aesthetic and technical approaches employed for creating and viewing images. In this piece, Dow creates an anaglyph 3D image of a vase of pink peonies. The title Natural Color points to the distinctly unnatural process of using red and cyan filters so that the image appears three-dimensional when wearing 3D or anaglyph glasses, thus adding a literal and figurative layer to a seemingly simple still-life. The result is an image that has multiple ways in which to be seen, ultimately confounding our trust in the photographic image.

Beth Dow has been exhibited internationally, reviewed in numerous publications including The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal, and received awards and fellowships such as the Grand Prize in the inaugural Photography.Book.Now competition (2008) and the McKnight Foundation (2011, 2004). This series was exhibited at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (2018) and the Lianzhou Foto Festival, Lianzhou, China, curated by Museum of Contemporary Photography executive director Natasha Egan (2019).