NEW YORK, NY.- In recent years, the artistic practice of New York-based photographic artist Caleb Cain Marcus (born 1978) has moved increasingly toward the abstract. His photographs are no longer visual reproductions, but rather references to how we conceptualize our thoughts and feelings while engaging with the world. In 2018, Cain Marcus completed a new series of 25 large-scale photographs, each depicting a shifting beam of light rendered in blood red.

These stunning works will be published this fall in Iterations, the third in a series of five art books by Cain Marcus published by Damiani that showcase the artist's new minimalist practice and masterful use of color. In Iterations, Cain Marcus explores color, shape and spatiality by mixing up digital and analog processes. In his essay in the book, the acclaimed post-minimalist sculptor Richard Nonas (born 1936) brilliantly captures the essence of Cain Marcus's new approach.

In an interview with Peggy Roalf published August 1 in DART / Design Arts Daily about A Brief Movement After Death, Cain Marcus's first series to embrace his new artistic practice, Roalf asked him if he could speak about Iterations, and how he sees this work evolving in the future.

"I'm trying to get away from the constraints that have been placed on photography. The prints from Iterations are a statement of the camera's ability to render light. They also accomplish a quality and presence of color that could not be achieved with a straight photograph. The use of watercolor over portions of the print produce a hue, translucence and surface texture that combine with the photograph to create color that is immersive and evocative. These prints, to me, are photography at its soul."

To read the entire DART interview go here. An exhibition of A Brief Movement After Death is currently on view at the Telluride Fine Art Gallery, in Telluride, Colorado through August 23.

In describing the world, Caleb Cain Marcus dismantles the building blocks of visual processing by eliminating perspective, scale and implied narrative. Engaging with his work necessitates no prior knowledge which forces the experience to be in the present and compels us to sense, see and feel the world in a new way. Cain Marcus' photographs are combined with layers of paint to create deep, complex and evocative color. His belief is that through color we experience pieces of the universe that otherwise could not be expressed.

Caleb Cain Marcus's prints have been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among other institutions. His work has been presented at the Ross Museum at Ohio Wesleyan, the National Academy of Sciences in Washington D.C., the Houston Center for Photography in Houston, Tufts Art Gallery in Boston, Palm Beach Photographic Center in West Palm Beach, among other venues. His photographs have been published in six monographs and multiple anthologies. He received his MFA from Columbia University.

"A photography not of abstraction, but rather of actual absence. Of aggressive limitation. An attempt to see and show more, by seeing and showing a carefully constructed less. A photography not denying its own limitations but rather acknowledging and using them ... A photography of swirling color thickened by physical bands of water-born pigments ... A photography of no story at all. Blood-red translucence only. And the captured presence of light tearing through." -- Richard Nonas, Sculptor