Northern Approach. Intrepid Potash, Wendover, Utah; William Keddell.

Ever really wondered what it is like to be a bird, gliding through the air, getting a true “bird’s eye view” of the world? Sure you have. Multimedia artist William Keddell, mostly known for his stereoscopic images, stopped dreaming about it and climbed into his own one-man flying machine, maneuvering the thing with his feet while he photographed the land below him.

Recently, he spent time out in the incredibly dramatic landscape of Utah, in particular of the salt flats and specifically a potash mine (potash derived from these flats has been used for bleaching and to make fireworks and explosives). The images taken from what would approximately be a bird’s distance from the earth are astounding, and make up the exhibit “Becoming Airborne.” The colors of these vast salt “lakes,” dotted with power lines and dirt roads, range from turquoise to deep blue to dirty green.

Lines North. Intrepid Potash, Wendover, Utah.

Some of the images are hanging at the Art@Work gallery, which also doubles as the dentist’s waiting room of art collector Arturo Mosquera. But it’s when you pick up the viewers that accompany each photo that perspective takes a real leap. Point the viewer up to the office lights and you become the bird, the landscape below you is in 3-D, slightly unreal. In fact, the stereoscopic effect makes the little trucks and power lines resemble toy models. It’s pretty amazing stuff. There is also one short video, which has an amazing sound-art soundtrack created by local artist Kerry Ware.

But there is an underlying exploration as well, about our ecology and what we are doing to our land. In an interesting note, Keddell would take off for his one-man flights from an old army base, in front the hanger that housed the Enola Gay — the plane that let loose the first nuclear weapon on Japan.

Next door in the little house that is the Farside Gallery (both are alternative spaces run by Mosquera), landscape also plays a big part in the photography, but the result is utterly different. Juan Pablo Ballester has plopped male models into some lovely-looking landscapes of Catalonia, where he now lives (he was born in Cuba), in a series of 2004 photographs in this exhibit “NoWhere.” In the front room, a beautiful blond young man is dressed in police uniform in a large-scale “landscape/portrait” — but he looks out of place, and we feel somewhat unsettled with these scenes. Like so many artists who have worked in exile, there is a sense of displacement, of rootlessness, that somehow everything is not in its proper setting. In that way, these artificial portraits have a relationship to the land that Keddell has documented — in his case they are real and not posed, but look what our intervention on those tracks of earth has done. That can be the most unreal.

“Becoming Airborne” and “NoWhere” run through Oct. 27 at 1305 S.W. 87th Ave., Miami. The office gallery is open during working hours, but call or email for an appointment: 305-264-3355 or [email protected].