Back and fill is a term that refers to a series of small movements used to maneuver a sailboat through a narrow area. It is also an idiom that refers to the act of reneging on a previous statement or promise. The phrase is appropriate here for describing both the production and operation of my work, as each depends on a series of small oscillating shifts. I use a variety of techniques, materials and processes including film and digital photography, darkroom processes, inkjet printing, print making, drawing, sculpture, installation, books, and collaborative performance. Materials are swept up, poured out, assembled, rearranged, staged, photographed, traced, cut, encased, built up, torn down, stripped back, excavated from and reabsorbed by detritus, leftovers and castoffs generated by events within the studio. Though the works move across materials and processes, they remain deeply rooted in a concern for the multilayered operation of images and the roles of the components that make them perceptible including representation, materiality, and spectatorship. Works invite viewers to trace the source of their origin and the processes by which they were made, purporting that this mental tracing is as pertinent as the image-objects themselves. As the work maneuvers through narrow spaces and reneges on previous statements, sense must be made of its parts, allowing positions of understanding to be acknowledged then reaffirmed or changed. Jerry Birchfield (b. 1985) lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned a BFA in Photography from the Cleveland Institute of Art and an MFA from Cornell University. He is an artist, a Full-Time Lecturer in photography at Case Western Reserve University, and the founder of Field Studio. Birchfield is a recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, a John Hartell Graduate Award from Cornell, and a think[box] Faculty Fellowship from CWRU. Field Studio photographed the majority of exhibitions for the 2018 and 2022 Front International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art catalogs and recently completed a large-scale photography project for inclusion in the Art in Nature: Rowdy Meadow Sculpture Park book published earlier this year. Solo exhibitions of Birchfield’s work include A Pale, A Post, A Boundary at Devening Projects in Chicago; Jerry Birchfield: Asleep in the Dust at the Akron Art Museum; and Stagger When Seeing Visions organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art at Transformer Station. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Abattoir, the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, 2731 Prospect, Reinberger Gallery, and SPACES in Cleveland as well as Riffe Gallery and ROYGBIV in Columbus, the Print Center in Philadelphia, Schema Projects and Foley Gallery in New York, and the Los Angeles Center of Photography.

Back and fill is a term that refers to a series of small movements used to maneuver a sailboat through a narrow area. It is also an idiom that refers to the act of reneging on a previous statement or promise. The phrase is appropriate here for describing both the production and operation of my work, as each depends on a series of small oscillating shifts. I use a variety of techniques, materials and processes including film and digital photography, darkroom processes, inkjet printing, print making, drawing, sculpture, installation, books, and collaborative performance. Materials are swept up, poured out, assembled, rearranged, staged, photographed, traced, cut, encased, built up, torn down, stripped back, excavated from and reabsorbed by detritus, leftovers and castoffs generated by events within the studio. Though the works move across materials and processes, they remain deeply rooted in a concern for the multilayered operation of images and the roles of the components that make them perceptible including representation, materiality, and spectatorship. Works invite viewers to trace the source of their origin and the processes by which they were made, purporting that this mental tracing is as pertinent as the image-objects themselves. As the work maneuvers through narrow spaces and reneges on previous statements, sense must be made of its parts, allowing positions of understanding to be acknowledged then reaffirmed or changed. Jerry Birchfield (b. 1985) lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned a BFA in Photography from the Cleveland Institute of Art and an MFA from Cornell University. He is an artist, a Full-Time Lecturer in photography at Case Western Reserve University, and the founder of Field Studio. Birchfield is a recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, a John Hartell Graduate Award from Cornell, and a think[box] Faculty Fellowship from CWRU. Field Studio photographed the majority of exhibitions for the 2018 and 2022 Front International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art catalogs and recently completed a large-scale photography project for inclusion in the Art in Nature: Rowdy Meadow Sculpture Park book published earlier this year. Solo exhibitions of Birchfield’s work include A Pale, A Post, A Boundary at Devening Projects in Chicago; Jerry Birchfield: Asleep in the Dust at the Akron Art Museum; and Stagger When Seeing Visions organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art at Transformer Station. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Abattoir, the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, 2731 Prospect, Reinberger Gallery, and SPACES in Cleveland as well as Riffe Gallery and ROYGBIV in Columbus, the Print Center in Philadelphia, Schema Projects and Foley Gallery in New York, and the Los Angeles Center of Photography.