CLIMATE VORTEX SUTRA
DAVID BENJAMIN SHERRY
September 07, 2014–October 25, 2014
Salon 94 Bowery - Website link
David Benjamin Sherry is an explorer. He is a master of bold, sensual color. He ventures deep into the American wilderness and reimagines the surfaces of nature as if seen through a kaleidoscope. Part-archeologist and part-futurist, Sherry uses 8x10 film negatives and analogue techniques in order to speak to new technologies and our changing physical world.
Sherry’s latest works take on photography’s canonical genres, including landscape – which he is most well known for – as well as still life, portraiture, the nude, collage and darkroom photograms. There are more waterscapes than landscapes – it’s a murkier, more mysterious realm. Many of these compositions sit at an uneasy intersection of travel photography and surveillance imaging. A sunrise behind a boulder in the water is somehow both a picturesque postcard and a strange alien spotlight. Another large-scale image of ripples on the surface of a body of water, without a horizon, are stained glowing, neon red, a color that implies blood or a dangerous kind of heat as if on a topographer’s or meteorologist’s map – though not quite the right shade of either.
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DANZIGER GALLERY
SEPTEMBER 11 - OCTOBER 25, 2014
Danziger Gallery is pleased to inaugurate its new space at 521 West 23rd Street with the first New York show of David Benjamin Sherry’s mono-color landscapes – a series of analog photographs taken in 2013 and 2014 as the artist traveled through the Western and Southwestern states. Seeing the world in both a heartfelt and postmodern way, Sherry turned his pictures into vividly colored renditions of the American wilderness, transforming iconic vistas and familiar panoramas into large scale color fields.
Using a traditional handmade wooden camera, and shooting with the f/64 aperture beloved by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston and their namesake f/64 group, Sherry maintained the eponymous sharpness while employing a scale barely imaginable to his predecessors. In this way, Sherry’s images invite the viewer to get lost in extreme levels of visual information while being seduced by the emotive power of color.
Blending truth and the photographer’s conservationist intent with a contemporary view of the role of the photographer/artist, Sherry’s landscapes remind us without preaching of the inherent value that exists in any natural resource – what it offers, what it represents, and ultimately, its ability to connect us to a broader experience.
