NEW EXHIBITION – Apprehensions: Eamon Mac Mahon, Jon Wyatt, Chris Bennett runs November 26 - December 19, 2015 at Circuit Gallery @Prefix ICA
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 26, 6-9 p.m.
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 11AM - 5PM
Website: http://circuitgallery.com/exhibitions/
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Circuit Gallery presents Apprehensions, an exhibition featuring new photographic work by Eamon Mac Mahon (Canada), Jon Wyatt (UK), and Chris Bennett (USA).
This exhibition brings together three artists who, in this time of increasing ecological crisis, are deeply engaged with landscape, and who ask us through these works to consider our place in, and relationship to, the wider natural world.
The Enlightenment concept of ‘man’ as an autonomous, self-conscious, and rational subject hinges on the separation of an ‘outside’ natural world from an ‘inner’ human and subjective one. With this separation in place, nature became seen as something external to discover, appreciate, and study. The ensuing modernist project mutated this view of the natural world into something for us to exploit, master and control for our own ends, in the name of progress, science, and reason. Paradoxically, nature has simultaneously been seen as so vast and resilient that it was safe from our depredations. Both of these ideas have failed us.
Apprehensions engages landscape both as a subject for photography and as a genre, where the traditional aesthetic categories of the beautiful and sublime, often synonymous with the landscape tradition in art, take on new resonances in our contemporary apprehending of, and affective orientation towards, the natural world.
This exhibition situates the work of these three photographers, and their different approaches to this genre, as having been predicated on and motivated by a profound and heightened awareness of our species’ contributing role in global warming and our unfolding catastrophe.
Landscape has always been an important genre and subject for photography. And it makes more sense now than ever that artists are reengaging traditional aesthetic categories and feel compelled to reevaluate our culture’s changed and increasingly fraught relationship with nature and to question our assumed place in the world.
Such art can open up the world and our relationship to it. It can destabilize and move us, reminding us that there are other ways of being in it.
The exhibition is curated by Claire Sykes with an essay by Leo Hsu.
Learn more: http://www.circuitgallery.com/exhibitions/apprehensions/
Image: Eamon Mac Mahon, Wildfire, Northwest Territories (detail), 2015
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