David Benjamin Sherry “Climate Vortex Sutra”

Salon 94 Bowery

poster for David Benjamin Sherry “Climate Vortex Sutra”

This event has ended.

David Benjamin Sherry is an explorer. He is a master of bold, sensual color. He ventures deep into the American wilderness and reimagines the surfaces of nature as if seen through a kaleidoscope. Part-archeologist and part-futurist, Sherry uses 8x10 film negatives and analogue techniques in order to speak to new technologies and our changing physical world.

Sherry’s latest works take on photography’s canonical genres, including landscape – which he is most well known for – as well as still life, portraiture, the nude, collage and darkroom photograms. There are more waterscapes than landscapes – it’s a murkier, more mysterious realm. Many of these compositions sit at an uneasy intersection of travel photography and surveillance imaging. A sunrise behind a boulder in the water is somehow both a picturesque postcard and a strange alien spotlight. Another large-scale image of ripples on the surface of a body of water, without a horizon, are stained glowing, neon red, a color that implies blood or a dangerous kind of heat as if on a topographer’s or meteorologist’s map – though not quite the right shade of either.

Sherry’s colors are surreal and often monochrome and painterly. A large degree of the compositions are achieved by the artist in the darkroom. His exaggerated hues border on acidic and futuristic, imbuing his sense with glowing sci-fi, filmic attitudes. Sherry’s particular, syncopated color palette gives sentiment and rhythm, setting up his scenes with rhythm and suspense. This setup is a direct engagement to our changing physical world. Sherry’s acid-toned pictures, while beautiful, are also critical of the close human relationship to recent climate change. They consider what critics call “the anthropocene” – or, geology and the ecosphere as it has been impacted by human activity.

In addition to mapping the rarely visited sites of the earth, Sherry also shoots the personal territories of the body. One photograph of a nude man in body paint, shows him reclining in feminine odalisque pose against a stark black backdrop. Resembling a hand-painted black and white photograph, the image both exposes the man’s body and shields his flesh in a rainbow of color, shaped in an arch, as if constructing him as a spectrum of light in a night sky. Another image of two men, covered in thick black petroleum, kissing, is a noir romance. Shooting bodies like land surfaces, Sherry stages still performances like a reverse landscape – the impact of changing nature on our adapting skins.

For the first time, Sherry juxtaposes black and white works, printed in traditional Gelatin silver process, with the energetic infusions of color that afford his landscapes an otherworldly quality. Moments of exuberant color are tempered by abstract and introspective black and white nudes, shot like terrain or anthropological subjects. Seen from below, chunks of melted icebergs are shot in rich black and white portraying an eerily decadent vista. An orange-stained image of an endangered species of frog is captured precariously dangling from a blade of tall grass. Sherry’s idiosyncratic vision crystallizes a breathtaking yet fearsome universe.

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Schedule

from September 07, 2014 to October 25, 2014

Opening Reception on 2014-09-07 from 18:00 to 20:00

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