Elijah Gowin
dal 7/9/2011 al 21/10/2011
Segnalato da
7/9/2011
Elijah Gowin
Robert Mann Gallery, New York
The artist's work has always been simultaneously engaged with questions around belief, ritual and memory as well as the material status of photographic representation. In the series 'Into the sun' Gowin has transgressed one of the most basic guidelines of photography, and of the gift of sight more generally by looking directly into the sun.
Into the Sun presents new works from Elijah Gowin's most recent series. Gowin's work has always been simultaneously engaged with questions around belief, ritual and memory as well as the material status of photographic representation. As critic Lyle Rexer writes, "Elijah Gowin is the prophet of this longing, the diviner of such dreams. His work confronts the impenetrability of the world and the challenge of representing it."
In this series Gowin has transgressed one of the most basic guidelines of photography, and of the gift of sight more generally by looking directly into the sun. To look in this direction is to seek communion with its faraway, generative force. At the same time it is an act that courts blindness, as the capacity for vision potentially self-ignites under its own ambition, like Icarus's melted wings. The eternal light source is that which enlivens our world generally, and which enables photography's particular art. Gowin's images reach towards the transformative and the transcendental. The world around us becomes a series of screens through which light itself is revealed — clouds, tree branches, a window pane. In the process, the same could be said about photography. Photography in these pictures represents a form of altered vision, a second perceptual apparatus for engaging the world. By staring directly at the light source, in many cases the optical structure of the camera is made explicit via lens flares and other distortions. Such unpredictable effects resound in surprising explosions of color and tone; at times, the distinctions between things seem to dissolve. Alongside the watercolor-like textures of the material support, Gowin shows photography to be a material engagement with the world — rather than a transparent window on it — but in such a way that enables visionary dreaming. To risk blindness is also to be offered the possibility of transformative sight.
The exhibition is the debut of pictures from Into the Sun, and coincides with the publication of Gowin's monograph, Of Falling and Floating. The book comprises three series, including Into the Sun, and an introduction by curator and critic Lyle Rexer; it is published by Tin Roof Press in an edition of 1000. Copies will be available at the gallery.
Into the Sun is Elijah Gowin's third solo exhibition at Robert Mann Gallery. His photographs are in numerous public collections including the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Center for Creative Photography, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. In 2008 Gowin was the recipient of a John S. Guggenheim Fellowship. He is an associate professor in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, where he lives.
Opening: September 8th, 2011, 6-8pm
Robert Mann Gallery
210 Eleventh Avenue - NY
Hours: monday-friday 10-6pm