NYAB Event - "Horizon Variations" Exhibition

"Horizon Variations" Exhibition

Baxter Street/ the Camera Club of NY

This event has ended.

"Horizon Variations," curated by Elizabeth Saperstein, is an exhibition of conceptual photographs inspired by the impact of decay, disaster and discovery on the natural environment. Working at the intersection of sculpture and photography, the artists use photography as a way to explore the philosophical side of occurrences in nature, such as the force of a hurricane, the extinction of a species, or the weathering of rock formations over time. By building scenarios from scratch, studying them, and photographing the results, the artists go beyond traditional landscape photography. Contemporary compositional methods such as sampling, altering and serial numbering are used in combination with commonplace materials. The pristine and eerily calm digital photographs – black and white, monochromatic, and/or color-blocked – are achieved through a variety of techniques.

The photographs in Heather Rasmussen’s "DestructConstruct" series are based on found photographs of shipping container accidents downloaded from the Internet. Each found image is used as a model for a sculpture that is constructed for the production of the photograph. The sculpture then exists as a photographic work, which directly relates to the original photograph, including the name, place, and date the accident happened.

Esther Choi explores the concepts of entropy, utopia, and failure in her "New Brutalism" series. Using imperfectly rendered crystals grown from laboratory kits, the results of these experiments are spontaneously placed in order to form impermanent, delicately arranged sculptures that allude to changing attributes of architectural constructions and landforms. The results of these temporary experiments are photographed.

Cecilia Schmidt’s "Migrations" photographs explore the influence of digital technology more directly on the way nature is represented in the media. Using rapid imagery from televised nature shows, the images are manipulated to heighten their digital origins. Scattered, twittering wings and beaks of birds in flight feel like extensions of our own nervous system.

Inga Dorosz’s photographs of tin foil consist of tableaus made out of common materials and framed in a way that references the environment on a vast scale – the ocean, lunar landscapes – as well as literary and filmic interpretations of “earthly investigations into difficult-to-reach territories.”

[Image: Heather Rasmussen "Untitled (M/V MSC Napoli, English Channel, January 2007)" (2009)]