SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Jack Fischer Gallery, in nomadic style, is presenting neoscape, a two-person exhibition pairing painter Kirstine Reiner Hansen with Michael Koehle, who builds sculptural reliefs from laser cut paper. Please join us at the Nelson Duni Gallery for the opening on June 20th.
The exhibition takes landscape, one of the oldest subjects in the history of both painting and photography, and asks,What does it look like now, when images are made and reconstructed in ways that would have been unimaginable to the artists who first wrestled the natural world onto canvas or plate?
Landscape painting tradition carries centuries of artists’ efforts at observing light and atmosphere; from the scrolls in Chinese landscape paintings to the Impressionists, who are well-known for fragmenting their vision into snatches of color and shapes. In this exhibition, the artists invite you to reconstruct and reassemble the image.
Photography arrives around the 1830s when the daguerreotype and the calotype could give us an image with an exactitude difficult to match with a paint brush. Early landscape photographers such as Carleton Watkins and Gustave Le Gray worked with long exposures out of necessity, which gave them blurred images of moving water and clouds that became something more painterly than real. The irony of this is that in trying to copy the landscape with the only available photographic tools at the time, they wound up with painterly images. In each case, the photographer was not simply recording a landscape but interpreting it through the particular language of light, chemistry, and time that the medium imposed.
Michael Koehle works at the intersection of photography, sculpture, and technology. Beginning with a photographic image, Koehle writes a program that analyzes its tonal values -- the same issues of light and dark that preoccupied early photographers. The program that he writes builds a topography of the photograph. Thin strips or sections of the photograph are printed and laser cut. The strips are then glued onto a panel, giving him the image/ photograph that he started with, but now it’s in three dimensions, its surface rising and falling in direct correspondence to the light and shadow within the picture.
The result is a topographical portrait of a photograph. Koehle has made the photograph physical, a map walkable with the eye. The landscape that Koehle is interested in is all about the halophytes, which are plants that thrive in high salinity. In Michael’s words: “In this body of work, local halophytes are translated into wall reliefs built from hundreds of layers of fibrous paper. Each layer aligns with a vector of force that shaped the plant: the wind off the bay, the pull of gravity, the angle of light, the arc of a footpath worn into the ground beside it. The result is a faux bas-relief, an image that carries the record of what produced it”
Kirstine Reiner Hansen is well known for a portraiture that is rooted in the European Old Master tradition. For this exhibition she brings that historical ethos to her canvases. She gives us a landscape as if seen through a television screen overwhelmed by interference. Her paintings present broad vistas fractured into enormous pixel-like blocks of color, the image caught mid-collapse, dissolving into the chunky, stuttering geometry of a failing signal. At this moment, the landscape breaks down into the noise of its own medium. The Old Master surface survives, but what it carries is the wreckage of the digital image. Hansen says “The fragmented imagery and colorful ‘noise’ is also a way to evoke the visual and auditory overload we increasingly experience from the influence of technology, blurring the boundaries between physical and virtual reality, and the constant balancing act we are learning to master between the two. Our perception of living life has fundamentally changed. There seems to be a growing distancing from reality, and thereby from nature and where we come from.”
Together, Koehle and Hansen stage a dialogue through different perspectives of image-making. Both are building on traditions that have always understood landscape as an invitation to test the limits of what a medium can hold. Both push those limits until the medium itself becomes the subject. Koehle rebuilds the photograph as terrain. Hansen paints the television as a failed window onto the world. In both cases what emerges is a new kind of landscape: one that is as much about how we see as about what we are seeing.
Please visit the exhibition at the Nelson Duni Gallery
35 Bartlett Street , San Francisco, CA 94110
Hours will be Thursday - Sunday 12- 5p.m.
or by appointment 415 725 0308
