Jerry Birchfield
(Cleveland, Ohio, 1985 - )
Jerry Birchfield lives and works in Cleveland Ohio and is a Full-Time Lecturer in Photography at Case Western University. He earned an MFA from Cornell University in 2014 and a BFA in Photography from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2009.[1]
Throughout his career, Birchfield has worked in a wide variety of media and processes including photography (both digital and darkroom), sculpture, drawing, installation, writing, and more. These different techniques closely intertwine, as an object created as sculpture may be photographed to yield new images, or the work of producing a photograph may inspire an installation or an essay. One creative act easily leads to another, then another, and another. Birchfield’s individual works suspend this generative process at specific points, but each retains a strong sense of dense creativity and open-ended possibility. And, because his work flows so readily from one medium to another, it retains a consistent aesthetic vocabulary even across many different forms.
Primarily trained as a photographer, the artist typically places photography at the center of these exchanges and overlaps—he has described his practice as “working from a photographic point outwards.”[2] At the same time, his capacious way of working also reflects back into his photography, which he considers not just in terms of imagery, but in many other respects that facilitate connections to other media. In his own words, “I’m interested in all the elements of a photograph being at an equivalent level. The pictorial, the material, the perceptual, and the durational, all occupying the same space.”[3] Fittingly, Birchfield’s 2018 exhibition at the Akron Art Museum, Jerry Birchfield: Asleep in the Dust, brought together a large sculptural installation and a series of related photographs so that they literally shared the same space.
Birchfield received a John Hartell Graduate Award from Cornell University in 2013 and an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award in 2011. In 2009, he received the First Agnes Gund Traveling Award from the Cleveland Institute of Art to fund a photography project focusing on the glacier Jostedalsbreen in Jostedal, Norway. Recent solo exhibitions include Jerry Birchfield: Asleep in the Dust at the Akron Art Museum (2018); Stagger When Seeing Visions at the Transformer Station, Cleveland, OH (2017); and You Are Not, Except As A Joke, Blaming Them at Angela Meleca Gallery, Columbus, OH (2015). His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art and 2731 Prospect in Cleveland, OH; at the Riffe Gallery and ROYGBIV in Columbus, OH; and Schema Projects and Foley Gallery in New York, NY.[4]
[1] This paragraph is drawn from a narrative biography provided by the artist.
[2] Rose Bouthillier, “One Thing, Then Another, And: An interview with Jerry Birchfield,” in Realization is Better than Anticipation, exhibition catalogue (Cleveland: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2013), 14.
[3] Ibid.
[4] This paragraph is drawn from a narrative biography provided by the artist.
View objects by this artist.