Eric LoPresti “An Ocean of Light”

Burning in Water

poster for Eric LoPresti “An Ocean of Light”

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Eric LoPresti is interested in the extremes that take place in the desert.

Dually trained as a scientist and as an artist, his oil paintings and collaged digital prints range from detailed, nearly microscopic, examinations of the plant and animal life that survives in the brutal environs of the American West to an overhead image of a massive subsidence crater, formed by an underground nuclear test.

LoPresti’s depictions of the desert function as a bracing rejection of the oft-held notion that the desert environment is fundamentally void of life.

As part of the comprehensive, vigorous examination of the atomic desert environs that recurs throughout his work, LoPresti intermittently shifts his focus to the extremely macroscopic by drawing upon high-altitude atmospheric and aerial surveillance imagery drawn from government archives.

The title An Ocean of Light is a quote from Joan Hinton, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan project, and who witnessed the Trinity Test in 1945. But An Ocean of Light may also be considered as referring to the ambient atmospheric qualities of the Western desert landscape.

One of the most beguiling aspects of LoPresti’s art is that, while addressing the extremely fraught topic of atomic weaponry and the threat of nuclear annihilation, his work simultaneously remains firmly defined by the optic phenomena of color and light — a paradoxical mode that he considers to be firmly ensconced within the painterly tradition of the apocalyptic sublime.

Media

Schedule

from April 12, 2018 to May 26, 2018

Opening Reception on 2018-04-12 from 18:00 to 21:00

Artist(s)

Eric LoPresti

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