NYAB Event - Nicholas Nixon "Old Home, New Pictures"

Nicholas Nixon "Old Home, New Pictures"

Pace MacGill

This event has ended.

The exhibition marks Nixon's first solo show at the gallery in over 2 decades. Included in this exhibition are contact prints made with a 40-pound, 11 x 14 inch view camera made in 2008-2009. It is within the potentially unwieldy nature of large format photography that Nixon finds inspiration. Because both negative and positive images are of equal size, the possible loss of visual clarity and tonal depth is minimized. Nixon's work has always championed photography's humanistic potential. Past subjects have included couples, family gatherings, and hospice patients; Nixon now turns the camera on himself. Magnified images of his face, hands, and neck are not as much self-portraits as they are topographical studies. Rather than creating a a disorienting effect, the remarkable lucidity of Nixon's images is a graceful and illuminating reminder that scale is relative. The seemingly insignificant details of a shirt's button or a patch of grass, when magnified, become objects of beauty and interest worthy of contemplation. Nixon also revisits the architectural landscapes of Boston in the 1 x 14 forma, a subject he began to explore in the mid-1970s. In these cityscapes, Nixon captures details of building surfaces, reflections and shadows to produce beautiful, cubist-like constructions. In each of these bodies of work, Nixon moves close to the subject to focus on details which allude to the larger whole.

[Image: Nicholas Nixon "Self (2), Brookline" (2008) gelatin silver contact print 11 x 14 in.]