Exhibition - Rick Wester Fine Art
June 2 –July 29, 2016
Lost in Space: Contemporary Photographers and the New Landscape
Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman, Christopher Colville, Molly Lamb, David Magnusson, Diana Matar, Lilly McElroy, Aaron Rothman
June 2 –July 29, 2016
Rick Wester Fine Art
526 W 26th St #417
New York, NY
This
summer RWFA is presenting a group exhibition featuring the work of
eight photographers abstractly exploring the classic subject of
landscape. Photographing the landscape is as old as the medium itself.
As a universal subject it reflects the aesthetics, approaches and
attitudes of each era throughout history. For the majority of its first
century of existence, photographic landscape relied on the Romantic
tradition of the 19th century. In the 1960s and 70s this began to shift
as Western culture, wrestling with profound cultural changes in the
Post-War period, such as Pop Art, mass media, consumerism and the Cold
War, altered how artists depicted the world at large. In photography,
many point to a single exhibition in 1975 for its growing influence. New Topographics, Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape
held at the (then) International Museum of Photography at George
Eastman House in Rochester, NY included work by photographers who shared
a similar disassociated, sly, sardonic and decidedly anti-Romantic
aesthetic including Robert Adams, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal and
Stephen Shore. Switching out the grand Western vistas of Watkins,
O’Sullivan and Adams for urban sprawl and endless concrete,
photographers began to radically redefine landscape just as Robert
Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour did for architecture in
Learning from Las Vegas in 1972.
Today’s
generation of photographers, while cognizant of this pedigree, hold
their work to no such didactic method. Lost In Space is a group
exhibition reflecting some of the current trends in landscape
photography, ranging from the lyrical to the dissonant, from the
personal to the disassociated. Interestingly, none follow the tradition
of using the photographic document as a self-referential means to its
own end. Instead, photography is employed to convey a personal point of
view, to support the photographer’s overt social condition or place of
self in the world. Process plays an important role in many of the
photographers’ efforts, including the invented image and the constructed
tableau. Landscape, as a concept is more implied and subverted than
clearly stated. If Nicholas Nixon’s statement in the original New
Topograghics catalogue “The world is infinitely more interesting than
any opinions I might have of it”, defines his generation’s position then
one might take Aaron Rothman’s artist statement as its correlative: Straight
photographs can’t quite convey the increasingly porous border between
the natural and the artificial, between the real and the virtual.
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