STEPHEN WILKES – DAY TO NIGHT
2019-11-04One of the most aesthetically complex and rewarding photographic projects of the last decade is Stephen Wilkes’s “Day to Night” photographic series. In Wilkes’s own words, he comments: “Day to Night has been a 10-year personal journey to capture fundamental elements of our world through the hourglass of a single day. It is a synthesis of art and science, an exploration of time, memory, and history through the 24-hour rhythms of our daily lives.”
In the 16th-century, a narrative landscape painting that much inspired and intrigued Wilkes at the age of fourteen, The Harvesters by Pieter Bruegel, would rouse a question for the future photographer, “what exactly does art accomplish?”
Painting can be a vehicle with the ability to transport you to another world, transcending time and space. When a moving train in silent motion pictures replaced the still image, making crowds jump from their seats about a hundred years ago, there was a change in technology that altered our perception of reality. Stephen Wilkes’s work taps into this fascination, alluding to the almost magical possibilities of capturing a complex world with a camera. In a time when digital manipulation is often used to reshape reality in photographs, Wilkes’s meticulous capturing of light moving through the landscape, presenting a day in its entirety, elevates the potential of what is real. Most significantly, it gives the viewer a new way to perceive the passing of time and reality.
Opposite – Washington Square Park, NYC, Day to Night, 2009
Exhibition runs through to December 14th, 2019
JL Modern
324 Worth Avenue
Palm Beach
33480 FL
