Raúl Gonzo: Color Madness

NICOLE COHEN: SUPER VISION features videos and photo-collages that explore perception as viewed through interior spaces and architectural environments. Cohen’s work often overlays past and present imagery, including vintage magazine pages, domestic interiors, period rooms, historical paintings and iconic architectural spaces, to comment on socially constructed space. Using video to transform and alter interior spaces, she delves into ideas of perception, surveillance and the physical experience of immersion. Her work is positioned at the crossroads of contemporary reality, personal fantasy and altered spaces. SUPER VISION presents work from major projects over the last 20 years including: Contemporary Art Books & New York Public LIbrary, Time Lapse, five small video projections, a group of photographs from the Vintage Project series, several Vintage Collage works, a selection of Intervention videos and a new installation piece. Nicole Cohen is an internationally-renowned installation artist who works with video and new media. Cohen received her BA from Hampshire College and her MFA from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She has exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Los Angeles County of Art, Williams College Museum of Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, La B.A.N.K Galerie, Paris, the Autostadt, Wolfsburg, Schloss Britz in Berlin, Germany, American University Museum at Katzen Art Center in Washington D.C., Wave Hill in the Bronx, and The Museum of the Moving Image. Her work is in the permanent collections of U.S. Art in Embassies Collection, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Williams College Museum, The Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, CA, Cedar Sinai Hospital, and others. Image: Amazon Woman, 2022 © Nicole Cohen

Koslov Larsen is pleased to present a group show for the commencement of the fall art gallery season. Earthly Delights walks us down a path of fantasy and fiction, through the winding walkways of the mind and out into the sun of a world crafted by imagination. This exhibition largely centers on the Fantastical Feasts by Claire Rosen, a series of whimsical panoramic photographs depicting animals reveling around elaborate banquet tables, visually inspired by the Dutch Masters and Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. From honeybees to hedgehogs to elephants, photographed across the world in collaboration with nature preserves and animal rescues, the images communicate a sense of humanity intrinsic in nature, a peculiar and yet profound kinship. “The feasts invite the viewers to reflect on the nature of society, our relationship and responsibility to the creatures we share the planet with.” Each staged image captures a magical moment which, while rooted firmly in reality, transports us directly into the realm of imagination. Rosen’s Fantastical Feasts series was exhibited earlier this year at AIPAD’s The Photography Show in New York City where it captured the attention of critics and collectors alike to much acclaim. The works were concurrently curated into the second edition of AIPAD’s Monumental exhibition. Also included in Earthly Delights is the work of Amanda Marchand, Torrie Groening, Margeaux Walter, and Kelda Van Patten. Marchand breaks nature down into its most abstracted forms through constructed lumen prints, exploring the relationship between endangered flora and fauna and humanity’s mark on time. Margeaux Walter’s playful trompe l’œil engages the viewer in staged, site-specific installations in the environment which toe the line between what is real and what is constructed and sensationalized, echoing a similar dissonance found in our current political and social landscape. Van Patten’s constructed photographs take us through layers of time and intervention, occupying a liminal space between artifice and truth as we delve through the many stages of physical and digital processing to arrive at a “final” image in a permanent state of suspense. Groening creates scenes of self-contradiction, bite-sized worlds which compel questioning and inspire fantasy. Throughout the exhibition, we find tension between that which is apparent and that which lies below the surface, scratching at the edges of our comprehension and animating limitless possibilities. Earthly Delights beckons us into a world which we will surely emerge from changed. Image: Cumulus © Margeaux Walter

Gagosian is pleased to announce Nan Goldin: You never did anything wrong at 522 West 21st Street, New York. Opening on September 12, the exhibition consists of two new moving-image works presented in specially designed pavilions and an extensive body of new photographs. This is Goldin’s first exhibition of new work since joining Gagosian in 2023. Stendhal Syndrome (2024) is a moving-image work, with a score composed by Soundwalk Collective, that juxtaposes photographs Goldin has taken over the last twenty years of Classical, Renaissance, and Baroque masterpieces with portraits of her own friends, family, and lovers. Photographs of paintings and sculptures from museums around the world including the Galleria Borghese, Louvre, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Prado flow seamlessly with images of Goldin’s community, crossing centuries to resonate in harmony with each other, revealing uncanny resemblances in composition, color, form, and emotional tone. Goldin’s ability to draw such precise visual connections raises profound questions about traditional hierarchies within art, and the enduring human compulsion to memorialize beauty in works fueled by love, and grief. You never did anything wrong, Part 1 (2024) is a home movie centered around the totality of the solar eclipse, filmed in Super 8 and 16mm. The soundtrack includes a mournful piece by Valerij Fedorenko, a chilling new score composed by Mica Levi, and ambient sounds of nature recorded during the eclipse. It is Goldin’s first abstract work, born from an ancient myth that an eclipse is caused by animals stealing the sun. The moving-image works are projected within freestanding pavilions designed by Goldin in collaboration with Lebanese-French architect Hala Wardé. Each structure is conceived to echo the corresponding film therein, creating a Gesamtkunstwerk that fuses architecture, image, and sound. Drawing from the same associative impulse that informed Stendhal Syndrome, Goldin created an expansive body of new grid photographs in which her own autobiographical images are mirrored by photographs taken in museums of artworks spanning millennia. The grid format, which has been a key element of Goldin’s work for three decades, echoes the cinematic structure of her moving-image works, encapsulating her understanding of history and time. These photographs line the walls of the gallery, surrounding the pavilions. Many of the grids explore stories of love and loss from antiquity, as in Orpheus Dying (2024), in which an 1866 Baroque painting by Émile Lévy of Orpheus is paired with a 1977 photograph of Goldin’s lover Tony. The visual parallels are striking, as both figures lie in nearly identical, seductive positions. Their pronounced rib cages create a haunting symmetry, and both bodies are draped against rumpled blue sheets that further unify the images, despite one being a classical nude and the other of a modern man wearing jeans. The shared palette and eerie shadowing of the two scenes blur the lines between past and present, high art and personal narrative, making their connection almost surreal—and evoking the pleasure and terror of the Stendhal Syndrome. Throughout her storied fifty-year career, Goldin has fearlessly probed the depths of the human condition, capturing raw moments from everyday life that reveal universal experiences of love, loss, and the truths that connect us all. Image: Hermaphroditus, 2024 © Nan Goldin

Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present Elisheva Biernoff: Smashed Up House After the Storm, an exhibition of 13 recent works tracing the artist’s expanding approach. Biernoff makes delicate paintings that meticulously recreate found, anonymous photographs—astonishingly faithful renderings on thin sheets of wood that match the intimate scale and detail of the originals. Severed from their original role as personal memories, the enigmatic photographs Biernoff selects evoke an element of ambiguity. By paying close, sustained attention to these objects, Biernoff brings their buried mysteries and emotions to the surface. Recent work has incorporated multiple images and non-photographic objects from sources such as nature or architecture, using these to make larger, more complex arrangements. This will be Biernoff’s third solo exhibition at the gallery since 2017. In several new works, Biernoff’s focus has widened to include fragments of the walls on which they exist, emphasizing the sculptural quality of these pieces. Fragment, 2024, recreates a section of knotty pine paneling that has changed color over time with exposure to light, leaving discolored shapes where pictures were once pinned. Beyond Our, 2023, measuring more than five feet tall, presents a photograph of a Sunday school interior and poster showing the earth from space, both hung on a painted rendition of a wooden wall. Together, the elements suggest questions about the larger forces that exist beyond the frame. Biernoff often plays with doubling, finding connections inside the frame and out. Strike, 2021, the work that lends the show its title, depicts a splintered tree trunk and house with a mangled porch. In looping blue cursive on the verso, also carefully painted by Biernoff, a note describes the scene: “Smashed up house after the storm, July 1970.” Like the house, the photograph itself shows signs of damage—a column of yellow and pink discoloration disturbs the right side of the image, perhaps caused by water. In other works, mirrors highlight the limits of what the camera could record—a reflected flash becomes a white haze, obscuring the picture-taker in Gathering, 2022. In Likeness, 2022, a man’s face is framed in a mirror on a crowded dresser, surrounded by snapshots and mementos. Installed on a small mirrored shelf, the reflections in the piece pile up, “creating a display that integrates with the painting rather than receding,” Biernoff writes. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring all 12 paintings the artist has completed since mid-2021. Many of the works are reproduced to exact scale and, consistent with the previous publications, all paintings are reproduced recto and verso. Image: Strike, 2021 © Elisheva Biernoff

In conjunction with the 2024 Filter Photo Festival, Filter Photo is pleased to present, Out the E, a solo exhibition of work by Harlan Bozeman. Out the E is a photographic project about the rural Arkansas Delta town of Elaine. In 1919, as cotton prices skyrocketed, Black sharecroppers—trapped in a vortex of debt and underpayment—began to organize for better conditions and fair payment. On September 30, a meeting of these farmers was disrupted by several white men, one of whom was killed. Hours later, spurred on by a “Black insurrection,” a white mob—including federal troops—descended on the area. Two days later, more than 500 Black people were killed in what is considered to be the deadliest racial conflict in the U.S. In Elaine today, there are some who don’t want to remember the events that began that day in 1919. There are others who have to talk about it. And there are others still, who believe it never happened. The racial divide is as strong as ever in Elaine, creating a culture of silence and negligence in this small community that has yet to truly heal. Law and way of life operate differently in this region and more than a century later, most of the town’s black residents live in a familiar cycle where they lack sufficient resources. In 2005, the town’s school district closed, forcing children to attend school in a town about an hour away. Arkansas Public Schools do not teach students about the Elaine massacre, leaving a majority of children without the knowledge of this tragedy that occurred in their own town. Having a taxable job forces you to lose government assistance, and government assistance prevents you from getting above the poverty line. The only employment opportunities in Elaine are a few local businesses or working on soybean farms, and the farming jobs tend to be offered exclusively to white people. To make money or discover opportunities, you have to leave. As more Americans are grappling with the country’s history of extracting wealth and resources from Black communities, Out the E is necessary to bring attention to a town and community that has long been forgotten.

In conjunction with the 2024 Filter Photo Festival, Filter Photo is pleased to present, On the Shelf, a photo book exhibition, juried by Clint Woodside—photographer, curator and founder of Deadbeat Club. Featured Artists Jaime Alvarez Trent Davis Bailey Julia Boytsova & Lina Nieminen Simon Chang Maureen Drennan Jess Dugan Matt Eich Morten Eriksen Rich-Joseph Facun Nick Gervin Conner Gordon Shane Hallinan Samuel Huryn Tetsuo Kashiwada Tommy Keith Claudio Majorana Aspen Mays Christian Nicolas Patrick D. Pagnano Wendy Ploger Jared Ragland & Sara J. Winston Benjamin Rasmussen Joshua Simpson Daria Sinaiskaia Laidric Stevenson Jamey Stillings Brandon Tauszik Angie Terrell Ryan Thompson Paul Turounet About the Juror Clint Woodside is a photographer, curator, and founder of Deadbeat Club, an acclaimed independent publishing house rooted in contemporary photography. Based in Los Angeles, Woodside works with artists around the world with the expectation of close collaboration and long standing partnership. With thoughtful design, innovative editing and meticulous print quality, each title is one Deadbeat Club is proud to share with its community. Woodside has curated shows and exhibited work extensively throughout Europe, Asia, Australia and the US.

Mitch Epstein’s newest series of photographs, Old Growth, continues the artist’s career-long exploration of American culture and the nation’s fraught relationship with the natural world. The exhibition will be on view at Yancey Richardson from September 5 through October 19, 2024. An opening reception will be held on September 12, from 6 – 8pm, with an artist walkthrough at 5:30pm. Following the exhibition at Yancey Richardson, Old Growth will be on view in a solo show at Gallerie d’Italia in Turin, Italy from October 16 through March 2. Steidl will publish a monograph of the series, due to be released in August 2024. From 2017–2024, Epstein traveled across America, photographing some of the country’s most ancient trees, among them bigleaf maples, eastern white pines, moss-covered cedars, sequoias, bristlecone pines, and bald cypresses. Old growth forests are crucial for human survival in our fight against climate change, as they hold significantly more carbon than replanted saplings. Yet humans have destroyed more than 95 percent of America’s irreplaceable original forests. Using a large format camera to describe the exquisite details of our arboreal ancestors, Epstein brings the forest to the gallery, creating an immersive environment that enables the viewer to absorb the sculptural beauty of trees and the multiple dimensions of biosystems that have flourished in the wild for centuries or millennia. These photographs evoke an other-worldly mystery. In the one photograph that contains a human figure, Congress Trail, Sequoia National Park, California, 2021, we gain some sense of the epic proportions of these life-giving trees. This series is also an inquiry into the concept of time. Old Growth underscores the tension between the medium of photography – the camera can record its subject in a split-second – and the forests depicted, which have potentially infinite lifespans. This oscillation between the instant and the ancient, between human mortality and cosmic perpetuity, resonates through the exhibition. Old Growth articulates the forest’s resilience and fragility, highlighting the need for us to act now to realign our relationship to these precious natural resources. “It is not about how we can save trees,” says Epstein, borrowing from ecologist Suzanne Simard; “It is about how the trees might save us.” Forest Waves, a new multi-channel video and sound installation by Epstein, will premiere in the project gallery. The piece takes viewers through four seasons in the Berkshires forests in Massachusetts. Epstein uses careful juxtapositions of visual and sonic rhythms and formal compositions to propel and disorient as we venture deep into the woods of his childhood. Through image and sound, we engage with a complex ecological network that, left to itself, can endure for millennia. How, the work asks, might this vibrant infinitude help us understand the relatively short timeframe of human life? Sound is integral to this piece. Epstein brought tonal musicians Mike Tamburo and Samer Ghadry into these same woods, where he filmed and recorded them improvising in response to the wilderness that surrounds them. Less performance than sonic communion, their music seems to emerge from the forest rather than impose itself upon it. Through its kinetic depiction of flora and fauna, and its mix of instrumental and ambient sound, Forest Waves engulfs the audience, offering a visceral, awe-inducing connection to wilderness. Born in 1952 in Holyoke, Massachusetts, Epstein lives and works in New York City. His work has been collected by major museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Tate Modern, London; and The Victoria and Albert Museum, London. He has worked as a director, cinematographer, and production designer on several films, including Dad, Salaam Bombay!, and Mississippi Masala. Epstein has won numerous awards including the Cooper Union Alumni Association Augustus Saint-Gaudens Award (2023); the Prix Pictet Photography Prize (2010); the Berlin Prize in Arts and Letters (2008); and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2003). Epstein’s seventeen books, most published by Steidl Verlag, include Recreation (2022); Property Rights (2021); In India (2021); Rocks and Clouds (2017); New York Arbor (2013); Berlin (Steidl/The American Academy in Berlin 2011); American Power (2009); and Family Business (2003), winner of the 2004 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award. Image: Lynn Saville, Plymouth Water Tower, 2019. © Lynn Saville

Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place is an exhibition created from three projects photographer Fazal Sheikh made on the Colorado Plateau from 2017 to early 2023. Sheikh’s portraits and landscapes shed light on the far-reaching consequences of extractive industry and climate change. Born in 1965 in New York City, Sheikh creates images of displaced communities and marginalized people that prompt awareness of the world beyond the museum. The photographs in Thirst ǀ Exposure ǀ In Place expose indelible marks on the Colorado Plateau and American Southwest landscape that have been etched by both geological and human forces. Through this beautiful and sometimes frightening new work, Sheikh encourages viewers to witness the consequences of the past and imagine the shape of the future. The exhibition presents Sheikh’s recent work in three interrelated sections: Thirst is a new series of aerial photographs that document the decline of the Great Salt Lake in northeast Utah, which is shrinking due to overconsumption and dwindling rain and snowfall. Exposure examines the impacts of uranium, coal, oil and natural-gas extraction on the American Southwest and on its Indigenous inhabitants. In Place evokes the enduring landscapes of the Bears Ears region in Utah, bringing Sheikh’s photographs together with contributions from scientists and Indigenous communities in and around Bears Ears in southeastern Utah. Visitors will reflect upon the transformation—and often devastation—of these landscapes in the context of the past, present and future, while considering the juxtaposition of beauty and catastrophe, as well as intimate, human-scale stories and those spanning vast geological eras and changes. Image: Fazal Sheikh, from the series Thirst: Great Salt Lake, November 2022 © Fazal Sheikh

Cara Romero is an enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, and was raised between the contrasting settings of the reservation in Mojave Desert, California and the urban sprawl of Houston, Texas. Romero’s identity informs her visceral approach to representing cultural memory, collective history, and lived experience from a female Native American perspective. Romero is focused on researching historical and contemporary narratives of identity and heritage. By staging theatrical compositions infused with dramatic color, she takes on the role of storyteller, using contemporary photographic techniques to depict the modernity of Indigenous culture, illuminating Native worldviews alluding to the supernatural in everyday life. The exhibition is divided into three sections—Native California, Imagining Indigenous Futures, and Native Woman. LOU STOUMEN PRIZE Cara Romero is the 7th recipient of the Lou Stoumen Prize in Photography. The Lou Stoumen Prize in Photography is awarded to a mid-career photographer whose work relates in spirit to Stoumen’s own humanistic approach to photography. The museum has previously awarded the Lou Stoumen Prize six times. The first award went to Debbie Fleming Caffery in 1996. Following recipients include Kenro Izu (1998), James Nachtwey (2002), Gary Schneider (2006), Michael Subotzky (2009), and Fazel Sheikh (2016). Image: Cara Romero, Naomi, 2017. Archival pigment print. © Cara Romero

Black and white photography captures a rare “Blue Sky” outdoor performance by the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus in 1972, when wet grounds prevented the Big Top tent from going up at the Bousquet ski area near Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Shelburne Museum is deeply grateful for the ongoing support and generosity of Elliot and Phyllis Fenander. Support for A Grand Spectacle in the Great Outdoors: Elliot Fenander’s Circus Photography is generously provided by Donna and Marvin Schwartz. Image: Elliot Fenander, The Les Blocks on Tightrope, 1972. Negative, 1 1/2 x 1 in. Collection of Shelburne Museum, gift of Elliot and Phyllis Fenander. 2011‑37.603.

My passion lies in finding often unrecognized moments of everyday life, from the mundane to the humorous. I am fascinated by human interactions and how they relate to their surroundings. These visual narratives of amusement, occasional alarm, and poignant reflection, are everywhere, happening continuously and occur simultaneously. I seek to capture those fleeting moments of humanity, moments that exist and then fade away. About the Artist: Charles Ford Charles Ford, raised in Houston, Texas, earned a BBA from The University of Texas at Austin. During his junior year, Charles seized the opportunity to travel to Bolivia, photographing the work of a student medical group. Post-graduation, based on the strength of his work in Bolivia, he was accepted to ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California where he earned a BFA. Charles moved to Dallas, Texas in 1980 where he shot fashion and portrait photography. In 1981, he was invited to teach photography at The University of Texas at Austin. Following two semesters teaching at UT, he relocated to New York, where he continued shooting fashion and portrait photography for magazines such as Vogue, GQ, and Rolling Stone. Whenever on the street, always with his Leica M6, Charles pursued his profound passion for street photography. After a decade in New York City and the birth of his daughter, Charles returned to Texas in 1992. He continued shooting fashion and portraits. Fast forward to 2023 when Charles revisited the contact sheets of his street work from the 80’s and early 90’s, rediscovering images that had been stored away for years, he began printing and sharing these captures of the past on his website and Instagram. Notably, all of Charles Ford's work, spanning from street photography in the 80’s and 90’s to portraits and current projects on his website, was shot on film. Image: © Charles Ford

Clarissa Bonet uses urban spaces as a dynamic backdrops for the subtle, often overlooked dramas of daily life in the city. Bonet studies the shape and behavior of sunlight and shadow, and then carefully constructs street scenes that are suspended in time, briefly illuminating the psychological space that runs under the daily routines. Bonet’s photographs have been exhibited at the Aperture Foundation and the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery, and are held in numerous museum collections. The exhibition at Pictura brings together three related series by the artist, City Space, Stray Light, and From Shadow to Sun, each one a distinct expression of her finely-tuned urban light stalking.