NYAB Event - Jesse Chehak "Western Views"

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At Bruce Silverstein / 20
Media: Photography

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Bruce Silverstein / 20 presents Western Views, a selection of landscapes from Jesse Chehak’s ongoing series Fools Gold.
“Like superb writers of the new west such as Ian Frazier or Timothy Egan, Jesse Chehak manages to put a view of place that is at once laconic, profound, light-hearted, and sad. That unnamable exhilaration one feels in the American West is in his pictures.” - Joel Sternfeld
The proliferation of landscape photography in the American West beginning in the late 19th century - following a robust program of federal land grants and a fervent gold rush - transformed our vision of the western expanse from a rogue frontier to a land suddenly laden with untapped enterprise and promise. Photographers of the period sought to reveal the region’s opportunity for growth and cultivation as a central theme to their images, often including the evidence of human encroachment in their photographs to support such beliefs. The resulting effect was an assimilation of the land’s meaning with the bountiful opportunities of the period and the consequences of the then burgeoning industrial revolution.
Jesse Chehak’s ongoing series, Fools Gold, recalls the reverence for nature held by the earliest members of the Western Survey photography movement from over a century ago. Chehak, much like his predecessors, regards the opportunism of the west with an acute sanguinity, citing the region’s bountiful splendor as evidence of its still-unspoiled terrain. Equally, Chehak’s purist approach to the medium speaks to his 19th century counterparts - using only a map and field camera as tools for navigating the terrain. Taking aesthetic cues from the German Romanticist movement, Chehak searches the region for breathtaking vistas to illustrate his veneration for the environment. Picturesque beauty abounds in the images - verdant fields lie beneath blue skies, mountains bathe in golden dusks, bison roam in the forest’s clearings, each serving as a perceptive reminder of the humbling admiration we experience when confronted with such natural resplendence.

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