Richard Renaldi “This Grand Show”

Benrubi Gallery

poster for Richard Renaldi “This Grand Show”

This event has ended.

Richard Renaldi’s new images are a meditation on the narrative power of pure landscape photography and a rereading of the American story inscribed across a damaged land. Inspired by the words of preservationist John Muir, who witnessed his absolute faith in America’s wilderness clash with the imperatives of the twentieth century, Renaldi’s new work occasions a present-day evaluation of Muir’s vision on the 100th anniversary of his death.

Working with references to Muir contemporaries Timothy O’Sullivan and Thomas Moran, Renaldi looks for iconic and densely metaphorical vistas. In “Monument Valley, Utah” a classic view of the Navajo monoliths is punctuated by the serene figure of a dog sleeping in the foreground, oblivious of the approaching shadow of night. The image is somehow tranquil, yet menacing. In “Sumatra, Montana,” two horses seek refuge from the prairie sun and wind, an ancient clapboard house the only visible shelter for miles around.

A diptych titled “The Big Top; Geneva, Ohio” reveals a canvass night sky stretched over a nearly empty circus, the only figures a lone trainer and the ghostly blur of a trapeze artist swinging like a pendulum in the center of the ring. When P.T. Barnum branded his traveling circus the “Greatest Show on Earth” he might well have been describing the grandeur of the American continent. Though at the core of Barnum’s guileful proclamation was a hint that the artifice was fleeting.

“This grand show is eternal,” wrote John Muir a few years before his death in 1914, yet Renaldi has cataloged the portents of a land continually vanishing into ephemera. A bakery window in Paris, Texas frames an oddly architectural cake, its whorls of icing intricately constructed. But the decorations seem incomplete: a totem left to grow stale in the darkened shop as the city lights come on. In one of the exhibition’s most mournful images, a long-forgotten arcade console featuring the space shuttle Challenger leans gently into the dust.

Media

Schedule

from April 17, 2014 to June 07, 2014

Opening Reception on 2014-04-17 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Richard Renaldi

  • Facebook

    Reviews

    All content on this site is © their respective owner(s).
    New York Art Beat (2008) - About - Contact - Privacy - Terms of Use