From October 7 – November 26, 2016, FraenkelLAB is pleased to present recent work by Los Angeles-based artist David Benjamin Sherry. This exhibition, the artist’s first in San Francisco, will feature 11 large-scale color photographs from his series Paradise Fire,Climate Vortex Sutra, Wonderful Land, Earth Changes, and Birth in the Futureverse.
In an era of ubiquitous digital manipulation, David Benjamin Sherry is a dedicated analog photographer pushing color photography into new territory. Sherry works with a large-format 8×10-inch or 4×5-inch camera, and many of the artist’s photographs depict iconic landscapes of the West, made in national parks such as Zion Canyon, Yosemite, Death Valley, and Point Reyes National Seashore. These landscape photographs embody the artist’s psychological reactions to the natural world, which Sherry views as under threat of ecological collapse. Similarly, the film technology used by the artist could be considered an endangered medium now facing obsolescence.
Although his choice of camera and subject matter may initially call to mind photographers such as Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and Minor White, Sherry’s unorthodox approach to the medium challenges the tradition of the straight male gaze. His printing methods make use of color filters that create intense monochromatic hues, resulting in emotive images filled with saturated reds, pinks, greens, and blues, “queering” historical genres and accepted formats of photography.
David Benjamin Sherry was born in 1981 in Woodstock, New York, and he received his MFA from Yale School of Art in 2007. Sherry’s work has been exhibited at the International Center of Photography, New York; MOMA PS1, New York; LACMA, Los Angeles; the Aspen Art Museum; The Garage Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow; and George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York. His photographs also have been the subject of three monographs: Its Time (2009), Quantum Light (2012) and Earth Changes(2015). Sherry’s work is included in the collection of LACMA; the Charles Saatchi Collection, London; and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; among other museums.
FraenkelLAB, spearheaded by Frish Brandt and Jeffrey Fraenkel, is Fraenkel Gallery’s new venue for adventurous artwork in any medium.
For press inquiries, please contact Rebecca Herman at 415.981.2661 or rherman@fraenkelgallery.com
