Howard Yezerski Gallery – Deviant Specimens
Amanda Means, Steve Miller, Gary Schneider
July 10 – August 18, 2009
For Immediate Release
Howard Yezerski Gallery is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition Deviant Specimens, featuring the work of Amanda Means, Steve Miller, and Gary Schneider, whose innovative approaches to botanical photography unveil the hidden lives of plants while provoking us to reflect upon our own experience of beauty, growth and decay. From photogram to silk-screened X-ray to pigmented ink, these works offer a new perspective of the power and vulnerability inherent in nature and in us.
Amanda Means works without a camera, placing the plants themselves in an enlarger and exposing their forms to photographic paper below. The result is a negative image; an intimate, luminous explosion of petals blanched white against a rich blackness. The densest parts of the flowers shine with almost unearthly glamour and the size of the prints accentuate their sensual elegance.
Steve Miller’s images are from his recent series, “Health of the Planet.” Miller traveled to Brazil and worked with a local hospital to create these high-quality digital X-rays of Amazon plants. Ghostly in their translucent, X-rayed form, the plants are caught like patients under the scrutinizing eye of the X-ray, while bold splashes of opaque, silk-screened paint alternately obscure, tussle with, and highlight their delicacy. The images, carbon prints and acrylic on canvas, marry the organic to the technical and ask the viewer to diagnose both his own state and that of the earth.
Inspired by 18th and 19th century botanical prints, Gary Schneider creates his intimate table-top still-lifes through durational exposure, sweeping a flashlight over plant contours and capturing the images in pigmented ink. Fig leafs, chestnuts, and roses well voluminously up out of the darkness. They hover above the viewer with a dense, unsettling beauty, somewhere between that of the religious icon and the sci-fi fantastic.
For further information please contact Howard Yezerski Gallery 617.262.0550 Tuesday – Saturday 10-5:30pm