Mark Wyse
dal 9/9/2005 al 15/10/2005
Segnalato da
9/9/2005
Mark Wyse
Wallspace Gallery, New York
Winter. The gaze of the camera is as paradoxical as the water it renders; the images disorient by way of unremitting depiction, thwarting scopic desire by their very insistence on clarity.
Winter
Wallspace will present a solo show of new work by Mark Wyse. Entitled Winter, the show will run from the 10th of September through the 15th of October. The gallery is located on the second floor of 547 West 27th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues.
Water is a potent metaphor for the photograph, it seduces with its glimmering transparency, and obscures with its shimmering surface; its seeming simplicity conjuring sublime mirages, and ephemeral chimeras. In Mark Wyse’s recent series of photographs, Winter, the gaze of the camera is as paradoxical as the water it renders; the images disorient by way of unremitting depiction, thwarting scopic desire by their very insistence on clarity. We are confronted with water collected in tide pools, lingering in the crevasses of weathered rock, and cohered in opaque masses, as mute and still as the worn shelves of stone, and jagged topography that surrounds them, the overcast scenes in which they are embedded evoking Turner’s foreboding renditions of Nor’easters approaching dwarfed coastlines, more than the placid shores of Los Angeles where they were made. But here water is not the allegorical sublime of Friedrich, or the chaotic violence of Turner, but is seemingly stripped of its hallucinatory proclivities, its invitation to poetic musings, and symbolist meanings. Wyse presents water in monochromatic expanses, and cool undulating fields of brown and grey, that deny the illusionistic depiction of space, as they absorb us into the depths of mottled tone. Our eyes move across the bleak topographies like the water itself, soaking into every pore, the entire scene rendered in a compression of photographic detail and flat legibility that paradoxically heightens our disorientation by their very insistence on exacting clarity. The stoic calm of the beaches produce a sense of foreboding, as if in the wake of a violent storm, or in the moment just before one. Light falls as if it were emanated by the matte topographies of the stony fields, etching the surface like the unremitting ebb and flow of the sea.
-Walead Beshty, August 2005
Winter is Mark Wyse’s third solo show at Wallspace, and also marks the publication of his first monograph, 18 Landscapes, released by Nazraeli Press.
Opening reception: Saturday, September 10, 2005 6 – 8 pm
Wallspace
547 West 27th Street, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10001