Opening Reception: Tuesday, April 20, 2021, 6pm – 9pm | Artists Talk: Friday, April 23, 2021, 6pm – 8pm (Robert Whitman, Jinane Ennasri, John Mazlish, Joseph Dalton, John Poblocki and Steve Prezant).
Curated by Taylor & Ponce Contemporary
Participating Artists:Filip Wolak, Carla Pivonski, Robert Whitman, Fernando Espinosa, Susan Magnano, Doug Kofsky, Joelle Soraya Batista Iseli, John Poblocki, Jinane Ennasri, John Mazlish, Joseph Dalton, Steve Prezant.
Artist Lectures: Saturday, April 24, 2021 from 5pm – 8pm
Fernando Espinosa: “Galapagos Surreal”
Doug Kofsky: “Photographing the Himalayas”
The photographers in EARTH portray both the living and inanimate, exploring earthly beauty in its many forms. Despite the variance of subject matter across the works, there is a sense of unity in line and form. Robert Whitman’s photographs seamlessly integrate bodies with environments, exploring the visual harmonies between EARTH and its dwellers through colors, folds, and textures. Steve Prezant explores the contemporary American Dream as a struggle for stability. His photograph “The Singing Cowboy” depicts a man on a horse performing for a dollar in a parking lot set against a bright blue Western sky. The EARTH serves as the great unifier and source of hope, the home for all life.
Filip Wolak’s aerial photographs simplify the natural environment into contour lines, shapes, and colors. Captured from above, the paths carved into the land create curving, biomorphic lines, evoking veins and tree branches. This organic pattern presents itself in the ripples of water in John Mazlish’s “Rebirth,” the sweeping lines of weathered rock in Susan Mangano’s “Starry Waterfall,” and the tentacles of jellyfish in Joelle Soraya Batista Iseli’s photograph “Hosts.” In “Hosts,” the flexible bodies of the jellyfish also resemble red blood cells, and the artist’s technique of shooting in deep water creates an x-ray effect that reveals a simple internal structure of flower-like shapes. This motif of repeated forms and patterns reinforces the connection between the natural processes that happen within bodies and beyond them.
This connection is heightened by the contrast between movement and stillness. John Poblocki’s photograph “Lower Antelope Canyon of Sandstone Carved by Water” depicts a static scene activated by the smooth undulations of the canyon rock, suggesting the process of formation by wind or water. Carla Pivonski’s photograph “In the desert I” captures a calm moment glorified by the setting of the sun. Doug Kofsky also plays with the ephemeral nature of light as a medium. His photograph “Qogori Feng” displays the Himlayan mountains clearly and vividly, a seemingly timeless portrait of a place that took the artist days of waiting to shoot in precise weather conditions. Fernando Espinosa’s photographs of orchids highlight their animal-like visual qualities. The flowers, though rooted in place, appear to be bending toward the lens as if posing for a portrait.
The photographs tell stories of natural occurrences and lives lived. Jinane Ennasri’s photographs highlight the vibrancy of human life through the beauty of nature, painting the social life of Middle Easterners as something other than violence and war, with which the region has widely been associated. Joseph Dalton’s work speaks to the power of nature to revive the human spirit. His photographs document his own journey of purification through connection with the natural environment and distance from the fast pace and high stakes of daily life.
