HAIK KOCHARIAN – SURFING COLOR

Posted on 2023-07-24

Surfing Color presents photographs that are abstract creations born from realism. Kocharian emphasizes the ambient color in the tradition of minimalism, observing the beauty and mystery of light, shadows, tone, and moods. The environments within the photographs are transformed into ones of symbolism, challenging the viewer to question the images. As a result, a tension is created, like an energy trapped in a frame attempting to escape.

Kocharian, who is also a filmmaker, brings a cinematic eye to his photography, as we experience images that reflect simplicity through his focus on light, color, and the documentation of ordinary life.

In “Going Home,” Los Angeles a pool-like shadow on the foreground alters the nature and surrounding of the image as light breaches from the center of the bike during sunset. “Blue Highway”, Nevada leads the viewer into the deep blue of early dawn and draws them into a new beginning.

His influences in these photographs include artists such as Mark Rothko and photographer William Eggleston, as Kocharian uses color, texture, geometry, and shapes to tell a story that evokes contemplation and introspection.

Opposite – Going Home, Los Angeles, 2014

Exhibition runs through to August 13th, 2023

Robin Rice Gallery
325 West 11th Street
New York
NY 10014

robinricegallery.com

  

RON JUDE – 12 HZ

Posted on 2023-07-17

Ron Jude’s imposing, large-scale black-and-white photographs made in Oregon, California, Hawaii, and Iceland depict the raw materials of the planet and its systems—lava flows, rocks formed from volcanic ash, river and tidal currents, and glacial valleys—that are the foundation of organic life. Stripped bare of the evidence of human existence, they remind us that these natural phenomena operate indifferently to our presence in the face of an imminent ecological crisis. The exhibition’s title references the lowest threshold of human hearing, 12 hertz, suggesting the powerful yet frequently imperceptible forces that shape the physical world and the limits of human perception.

Opposite – Cooled Lava Flow with Fracture, 2022.

Exhibition runs through to August 13th, 2023

Frist Art Museum
919 Broadway
Nashville
TN 37203

fristartmuseum.org

  

DON NETZER: THE LETHAL BEAUTY OF VIOLENCE

Posted on 2023-07-10

Can the words, “Beauty” and “Violence” work together? Maybe when we look at a painting, for example, Pablo Picasso’s, Guernica, we can see beauty in Picasso’s depiction of the 1937 bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by German and Italian bombers during the Spanish Civil War. Or maybe there is beauty in a Venus fly-trap plant, designed to kill in a subtle, menacing manner.

Don Netzer’s photographs depict sleek, streamlined cartridges, presented as portraits, the artist’s specialty. The magnified images of these projectiles elicit a response of danger and perhaps awe in the design. The cartridge contains the explosive charge and the bullet that, when loaded into a weapon, becomes the lethal component.

Opposite – Columbine High School, Columbine, Colorado, April 20, 1999, 9mm and 12 gauge shotgun cartridge, 13 killed, 2022

Exhibition runs through to August 12th, 2023

PDNB
150 Manufacturing St., Ste 203
Dallas
TX 75207

www.pdnbgallery.com

  

EVELYN HOFER – EYES ON THE CITY

Posted on 2023-07-03

Evelyn Hofer (American, born Germany, 1922-2009) was a highly innovative photographer whose prolific career spanned five decades. Despite her extraordinary output, she was underrecognized during her lifetime and was notably referred to by New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer as “the most famous unknown photographer in America.” She made her greatest impact through a series of photobooks, published throughout the 1960s, devoted to European and American cities, including Florence, London, New York, Washington, DC, and Dublin, and a book focused on the country of Spain. Comprising more than one hundred vintage prints in both black and white and color, Eyes on the City, the artist’s first major museum exhibition in the United States in over fifty years, is organized around those publications. The photographs to be featured combine landscapes and architectural views with portraiture, conveying the unique character and personality of these urban capitals during a period of intense structural, social, and economic transformations after World War II.

Opposite – Gravediggers, Dublin, 1966

Exhibition runs through to August 13th, 2023

High Museum Of Art
1280 Peachtree St NE
Atlanta
GA 30309

high.org

  

ADAM EKBERG – MINOR SPECTACLES

Posted on 2023-06-26

Whatever transpires in the blink of an eye can be either a minor occurrence or a great spectacle, depending on our perception of that event. What happens when we are the sole witness to an event? There is an inherent loneliness in not being able to share something, whether mundane or astonishing, with others.

This loneliness permeates Adam Ekberg’s whimsical photographs that document the climax of orchestrated events. While the camera freezes them into still lifes, a sense of continuity—like the arc of a story—happens as one realizes that Ekberg (American, b. 1975) invented, manifested, documented, and concluded these events. The objects take on lives of their own, even though we know that such agency is impossible for a roller skate, a pumpkin, or a balloon to have without human intervention. Ekberg’s presence is underscored by his absence in the resulting pictures.

Opposite – Eclipse, 2012

Exhibition runs through to September 3rd, 2023

Eastman Museum
900 East Avenue
Rochester
NY 14607

www.eastman.org

  

DARREL ELLIS – REGENERATION

Posted on 2023-06-19

As moving as it is complex, the multifaceted work of Darrel Ellis (1958–1992) restages a lost vision of Black selfhood and domesticity. His oeuvre has presented a formidable challenge to curators and scholars over the last thirty years for its unfinished tenor, a perception heightened by his untimely death due to AIDS-related causes at age 33. Although Ellis’ work was included in important contemporary surveys during his lifetime, including the 1989 exhibition Witnesses: Against Their Vanishing, organized by Nan Goldin, only now is it beginning to garner the attention it deserves. The exhibition Darrel Ellis: Regeneration offers the first comprehensive, scholarly survey of this pioneering artist, whose highly original merging of painting, printmaking, and photography anticipated current artistic interest in archive, appropriation, and personal narrative.

Opposite – Untitled (Laure, from Father’s Photograph), ca. 1990

Exhibition runs through to August 7th, 2023

The Bronx Museum Of The Arts
1040 Grand Concourse
Bronx
NY 19456

bronxmuseum.org