Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery is pleased to announce Navigating the Ether, a new exhibition featuring four international artists - Olafur Eliasson, Hamish Fulton, John Gerrard and Nanna Hänninen. Transcending traditional representations of landscape, these artists offer a more complex synthesis that encompasses time, space and an exploration of the interconnectivity of the natural world. Presenting works that explore a broad range of mediums, Navigating the Ether compels us to reflect on the intricate balance that constitutes our co-existence with the surrounding environment and beyond.
Olafur Eliasson's installations feature elements appropriated from nature; light, heat, moisture, steam and ice are manipulated by the artist in response to a specific site. Eliasson's work navigates the space between nature and technology. Dodecahedron disseminates light through the lamp's multi sided prisms, simulating the passage of light through the branches of trees in a forest. The work is constructed with industrially produced prismatic glass, steel and rubber, creating an experience that is at once physical, sensory and emotional.
John Gerrard melds the real and the virtual to create works that are sculptural, cinematic and photographic. In Grow/Finish Unit (Eva, Oklahoma) Gerrard employs 3D computer gaming techniques to achieve a high degree of pixilated detail. The viewer is encouraged to navigate a large arc around the scene (in this case a series of feedlots) by rotating the screen. The setting unfolds in realtime over the 365 days and its light conditions, from dawn to dusk, match that of the local site. Neither real nor imagined, Gerrard's work creates an unsettling universe which he calls "a post-cinematic slipping space between the image and the object".
Nanna Hänninen's New Landscapes renders a definable landscape as a series of abstracted lines and colors. The quality of her photographic work, the result of exploring great expanses of landscape on foot with her large format camera with an open shutter, reveals a living presence of the ever-changing elements of nature. Photographing from New York to Basel, her pictures of urban landscapes and recognizable environments explore the idea of the physical world as a real but mystical entity. Like the minimalists of the 1960's, Hänninen creates 'pure' objects by emptying her subject of all recognizable content.
Hamish Fulton describes himself as a "Walking Artist". He documents his country walks and treks using a combination of photographs and text. A recurrent image in his work is of large boulders. Touching Boulders by Hand documents a 21 day walk through the Bear Tooth Mountains of Montana with a close-up photograph of a large, rotund boulder that is perched precariously on a mountaintop. Fulton's imagery of boulders reveals an understanding of nature as both intimate and indomitable.