Rick Dingus has explored the cultural and topographical landscapes of the western United States for more than four decades. Beginning in the late 1970s, his black and white and color photographs heightened with drawing created a dialogue between the multiplicity of photographic processes and the singularity of drawing. In the last several decades his panoramic, infrared, and circular images have been coupled with an unrelenting tinkering with cameras and lenses to adjust the “windows” of his worlds.

Dingus recently donated over 750 works, including notebooks and related notes, to an archive of his work in the AP/RC. His imagery explores ironies, contradictions, dialogues, and symbioses among human manipulated environments. While much of his attention has been directed toward the southwestern United States, Dingus has pictorially examined other regions of the western United States, as well as India, Australia and Mexico.

As the artist notes, “I’m interested in any situation that prompts contemplation of the curiously complex connections we share with the larger patterns of existence. Remote wilderness and rural settings, vernacular byways, urban environments, ancient pathways, ruins, historic, mythic and spiritual pilgrimage sites, scientific and technological research facilities, folk and professional museums, shrines, collections, displays, and dioramas all fascinate me because these places reflect individual and collective responses, understandings, and a myriad of relationships to the same world I live in.”

In 2016 the Museum of Texas Tech presented a retrospective exhibition  and the University of Oklahoma published a monographic survey of Dingus’ work, Shifting Views and Changing Places: The Photographs of Rick Dingus.

Go to the artists web site at: http://www.rickdingus.com/