Karen Halverson - Davis Gulch, Lake Powell, Utah. 1995.

Michael Dawson Gallery is pleased to present DOWNSTREAM: ENCOUNTERS WITH THE COLORADO RIVER, an exhibit of the photographic artwork of Karen Halverson. DOWNSTREAM is an arresting vision of the Colorado River by renowned landscape photographer Karen Halverson. Halverson explores the Colorado, a river crucial to development in the West, which is at once wilderness, natural resource, recreation area, and wasteland.

In her large-format color photographs, Halverson takes the viewer on an intimate exploration of the entire length of the Colorado, from its rugged upstream canyons, to its dams and reservoirs, to where it disappears, entirely consumed, into the desert.

Halverson's images capture the river's natural majesty, as well as the strange and unexpected beauty of its altered state. Halverson explored the Colorado by car, on foot, and by raft, and her work is an extraordinary view of the Colorado's great enduring splendor, as well as a clear-eyed look at the many ironies involved in the complex water-delivery system of the American west.

The exhibition is accompanied by a new hard cover monograph of Halverson's Colorado River photographs, published by the University of California Press. Halverson's landscape photographs have been featured in numerous group and solo exhibitions. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Corcoran Gallery, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others.