November 2022 UNDER A ROCK, ALONG THE SHORE
under a rock, along the shore explores the multifaceted legacy of the relationship between human, land and camera. The show’s photographs and objects evoke the experience of moving through and interacting with the high desert mesas and fertile valleys of the Desert Southwest, where most of the artists reside. Read statements from our gallery director and one of the show's curators below.
Contemporary photography is embroiled in a protracted reckoning with the demise of the grand vista. The landscape genre has always been a vector for notions of power and control, whether that reflects on what the artist possesses, what they desire or what they fear. The practices of photographers featured in under a rock, along the shore abandon these entrenched ideas of expansive views in favor of focusing on the specificity of place. They challenge popular visualizations of the natural world as unblemished and untouched, captivating and capturable.
Macroscopic views of the landscape appear in Will Wilson's aerial interrogations of abandoned uranium mines on Navajo Nation, while Daniel Hojnacki's cosmic darkroom explorations utilize the physically tangible materials of soot and paper to communicate ideas about the intersection of land, body and material. Dakota Mace and Justin Guthrie complicate this idea further, as they confront personal experiences of Indigeneity through intimate imagery that investigates the violent legacies of colonization in the Southwest.
Moving towards haptic experience, Emily Margarit Mason and Julia C. Martin craft new worlds through minute details, as Martin's intimate, root-focused tree portraits pair with Mason's composed, re-photographed assemblages to present familiar worlds in new and potentially hopeful ways.
While under a rock, along the shore remains rooted in photographic history through process, participating artists push the boundaries of what a landscape photograph can say, what stories should be included, and how the genre is represented. These works force us to lift up the proverbial rock to see what's underneath, to examine the dirt and the moss that's accumulated and to consider the implications of showing what has previously been unseen.
September 2022 Art on Paper
Booth C11
Richard Levy Gallery is pleased to participate in Art on Paper. Come find us at Booth C11. Nine of the nineteen artists being shown in our booth are presented at Art on Paper for the first time including works by Derrick Adams, Karsten Creightney, Ellsworth Kelly, Amie LeGette, Emily Margarit Mason, and Chelsea Wrightson. Returning artists include Mick Burson, Susanna Carlisle + Bruce Hamilton, Alex Katz, Joanne Lefrak, Matt Magee, Matthew McConville, Emi Ozawa, Jackie Riccio, Ed Ruscha, Jennifer Vasher, Shoshannah White, Jonas Wood.
High-resolution images are available on request. Preview our booth on Artsy.
JULY 8 2022 that space, that garden
that space, that garden is a group exhibition from lens-based artists Madeline Cass (NE), Meganelizabeth Diamond (CAN), Leah Koransky (CA), Emily Margarit Mason (NM) and Meg Roussos (WA) exploring the expansive possibilities that are given life when femme and queer perspectives engage with the genre of "landscape". Though the legacy of this imagery is firmly stamped with terms like "modernism" and "straight photography", this group of artists uses the tools of photographic history, from the earliest photographic methods to the most postmodern, to investigate the tactility and emotionality of a climate on the brink of catastrophe.
While distinctive in practice, the tools of these artists all overlap; their methodologies and processes are all oriented toward engaging with the land around them as an active co-conspirator. Through their images, these artists do not beg the viewer to "see like me" but rather invite the audience to "see for yourself" or, better yet, "touch for yourself".
Physically constructed interventions staged by Meg Roussos pair with the re-photographing and assembling of natural materials present in the studio constructions of Emily Margarit Mason and Meganelizabeth Diamond provide tactile avenues for understanding the natural world. Simultaneously, the imagery explored by Madeline Cass and Leah Koransky engage in the fickle temporality of necessary cycles, from witnessing prescribed burns to religiously tracking the shadows of neighboring trees across the wall. This meeting of methodologies demonstrates a variety of ways to process the unknowable powers underpinned by observable cycles in the natural world. There is an excitement in this, in this enthusiasm and obsession with things that exist outside of us, in engaging with and embracing the impossibility of ever truly understanding, in existing in that space, that garden.
-Delaney Hoffman