Notes
Western Views
For Immediate Release
Jesse Chehak: Western Views September 4th – October 11th, 2008 Opening: Thursday, September 4th, 6-8pm
Bruce Silverstein / 20 is pleased to announce Western Views, a selection of landscapes from Jesse Chehak’s ongoing series Fools Gold.
“Like superb writers of the new west such as Ian Frazier or Timothy Egan, Jesse Chehak manages to put a view of place that is at once laconic, profound, light-hearted, and sad. That unnamable exhilaration one feels in the American West is in his pictures.”
Joel Sternfeld
The proliferation of landscape photography in the American West beginning in the late 19th century – following a robust program of federal land grants and a fervent gold rush – transformed our vision of the western expanse from a rogue frontier to a land suddenly laden with untapped enterprise and promise. Photographers of the period sought to reveal the region’s opportunity for growth and cultivation as a central theme to their images, often including the evidence of human encroachment in their photographs to support such beliefs. The resulting effect was an assimilation of the land’s meaning with the bountiful opportunities of the period and the consequences of the then burgeoning industrial revolution.
Jesse Chehak’s ongoing series, Fools Gold, recalls the reverence for nature held by the earliest members of the Western Survey photography movement from over a century ago. Chehak, much like his predecessors, regards the opportunism of the west with an acute sanguinity, citing the region’s bountiful splendor as evidence of its still-unspoiled terrain. Equally, Chehak’s purist approach to the medium speaks to his 19th century counterparts – using only a map and field camera as tools for navigating the terrain. Taking aesthetic cues from the German Romanticist movement, Chehak searches the region for breathtaking vistas to illustrate his veneration for the environment. Picturesque beauty abounds in the images – verdant fields lie beneath blue skies, mountains bathe in golden dusks, bison roam in the forest’s clearings, each serving as a perceptive reminder of the humbling admiration we experience when confronted with such natural resplendence.
Permalink / 03 Sep. '08
Make-Believe
So the stars exploded. So we were and are composed of the matter that henceforth dusted the universe. So it’s still happening—a tiny glaze of battered, blown star to set the earth awriggle. By this, of course, I mean two things. 1) We are walking miracles. 2) The only thing separating us from nothing is stardust. For instance, what is the difference between a wineglass with and without its fingerprint or lip smudge? Similarly, how does a vacated home hold the mundane movements of a person who gets paid to lie? There are certainly cells involved, strains of DNA endowing the rim like a piece of amber, coating the closets with their statistical leavings. But these are largely unseen and celebrity has everything to do with seeing (or not seeing as the case may be). This is the story of how Duchamp’s silence left us in a vacuum that could only be filled with an endless parade of readymades “proving” in the pages of US Weekly that they are “just like us.” This is the story of a conspiracy—and for this I want you to think of breath—the manner in which inspiration has been replaced by the possibility of us all conspiring. Madonna herself, the original goddess of drought, has said she becomes overcome during her concerts thinking of how the air must be shared by all those people, how they enter her and take her away. This is likewise the story of transfiguration, how everyday objects escape the perceived brutality of their perceived banality. A hat, if donned by even the most middling of celebrities, may become a relic. Our eyes grow frantic and in the ardency of their looking create a sort of religious film that covers everything famous. We harvest this Planet Hollywood-brand ectoplasm and soon every hollowed-out reality show reject is King Midas, coating all he touches with a sheen of invisible slime. These relics return our lives to the diminished grandeur of the present. Perhaps they will go so far, and the concept of celebrity will stretch so thin, that the everyday will again appear to us as miraculous. Perhaps our own faces will glow, not in the nuclear reflection of Page Six, but in renewed recognition of their particular strangeness. As they say in Phenomenology, the color of the human face is not less mysterious for its familiarity. What is the color of your face? Where are the star particles? What glorious slug-trail have you left on the world?
-Chris Martin
Permalink / 23 May. '08
Reflecting
On the San Andreas Fault
Permalink / 22 May. '08
Fool's Gold
“Once caught by the golden lure you become a prospector for life, condemned, doomed, exalted… The search for what? They could not have said; neither can I… anything as pretext. And how could they hope to find this treasure which has no name and has never been seen? Hard to say—and yet, when they found it, they could not fail to recognize it.”
EDWARD ABBEY, DESERT SOLITAIRE
Permalink / 15 May. '07
The Highline
The Highline Project began during the winter of 2003. I was invited by Friends of the Highline, a non-profit committed to transforming this elevated rail track into a parkspace.
Permalink / 14 May. '07
The Sequoia Forest
Sequoia is a genus in the cypress family Cupressaceae (Taxaceae or Taxodiaceae by others), containing the single living species Sequoia sempervirens. Common names include Coast Redwood and California Redwood (it is one of three species of trees known as redwoods). It is an evergreen, long-lived, monoecious tree living for up to 2,000 years, and is commonly considered the tallest tree in the world, reaching up to 115.5 m (379.1 ft) in height and 7 m (23 ft) diameter at the base. It is thought to be named after the Cherokee Indian leader, Sequoyah, though this is uncertain.
Permalink / 14 May. '07
Two's & Threes
Two’s & Threes began during a particularly inspiring cross-country roadtrip during the late summer of 2002. This body is ongoing as of 2007.
Permalink / 12 May. '07
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