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Sep. 26, 2014 – Nov. 1, 2014
1500 Elm Street near Washington Park | Over-the-Rhine | Cincinnati
David Benjamin Sherry: Western Romance proposes a conversation between history and contemporary art, combining in one gallery space recent works by Sherry with masterpieces of American landscape photography. Through selection and thoughtful juxtapositions, the installation also presents a conversation between artist and curator, maker and historian.
Sherry's photographs attempt to reinvigorate a long tradition of Western landscape photography, taking as their starting point works by the great masters of American photography, such as Carleton Watkins, Timothy O'Sullivan, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Minor White. They also attempt to reinvigorate the experience of being in nature, typically mediated today by photography and other forms of representation. By placing Sherry’s contemporary photographs in dialogue with historic works from Cincinnati private collections, Western Romance explores the ways in which the image of the West has been hewn through photography over time into an iconic landscape — a landscape conveying majesty, adventure and endless natural resources.
In his work, Sherry also seeks to convey something of the sublime physicality of the American landscape by enlarging his prints and adding bold primary colors: ochre, magenta, cerulean. Thus through a process of imitation and alteration, the artist attempts to reactivate both a depictive tradition of the American West through photography and, on a more fundamental level, nature as experienced through visual representation.
David Benjamin Sherry is an American Artist based in Los Angeles. Sherry works primarily with photography, exploring color through a mixture of landscape and studio work. Recent gallery shows at Salon 94, New York, and Oh Wow Gallery, Los Angeles, explored the topography of the desert and the American West through multiple photographic processes, aiding the artist in his attempts to push photography to a “chromatic extreme.”