Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to return to FOG Design+Art with a selection of artworks centered on the arboretum and trees in their many forms and seasons. Among the highlights are works by Robert Adams, Elisheva Biernoff, Kota Ezawa, Lee Friedlander, Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar, Richard Learoyd, Richard Misrach, Alec Soth, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Richard T. Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, and others.
A somber image from Nan Goldin’s Memory Lost, the haunting and emotional narrative comprised of outtakes drawn from her archive of thousands of slides. Depicting scenes from Goldin’s life and her circle of friends, the piece recounts the pain and fleeting moments of beauty in life lived through the lens of addiction.
In Peter Hujar’s photograph of a New Jersey forest in winter, the horizon is obscured by a band of tall marsh grass that grows beyond the trees, complicating the view. While Hujar is best known for his portraits, he also produced landscapes, seascapes, and views of the city, images that share his signature mixture of delicacy and directness.
Janet Cardiff’s painting of a house where she once lived is paired with a fragment of found text from an old detective novel. As with much of her work, the piece combines a visual component with information in another format, exploring how one affects the viewer’s understanding of the other.
With its striking contrast and central branching shape, Lee Friedlander’s photograph brings to mind elemental forces. The image is one of many that Friedlander made in parks and gardens designed by celebrated 19th-century landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. Friedlander has described these as “one photographer’s pleasurable and wandering glances at places that bear the great vision of Mr. Olmsted.”
Alec Soth’s image calls to mind the projections seen inside a camera obscura. His wintry photograph of a patch of light on a blue wall collects evidence of what the camera doesn’t show—two panes of an unseen window and its sash, and the bare branches of more distant trees.
Robert Adams’s joyous springtime study of a cottonwood tree from 1978 was first seen in From the Missouri West, his iconic book of landscapes published in 1980. The sprawling bloom is interrupted only by a barbed-wire fence spanning the length of the composition—Adams’s awareness of human encroachment onto the landscape.
Richard Misrach began photographing in the deserts of the American West in 1975, working at night with long exposures and a strobe technique to create images of cacti, trees, rocks, and the desert floor. His unique split-toned printing process heightened the black and white tones of the subject while infusing a coppery glow to the background. In an environment that most would consider stark and barren, Misrach and his camera found a rich and mystical landscape.
For his series The History of Photography Remix, Kota Ezawa recreated important art and documentary photographs in his signature flattened style, making a recognizable yet reimagined version of history. This image from the series references Carleton E. Watkins’s photographs of Yosemite, simplifying the shapes of trees in the valley and the outline of El Capitan.
Carleton E. Watkins’s celebrated mammoth-plate pictures of Yosemite served an essential role in convincing Congress to protect the valley. In 1864, Abraham Lincoln signed legislation to create the Yosemite Grant, the first time the U.S. government set aside land specifically for preservation and public use, and a step towards the creation of the National Parks System.
Carrie Mae Weems’s 2008 Constructing History depicts pivotal and wrenching events from the 1960s and beyond, but this image from the series presents a more contemplative moment. Photographed on the same bare stage set as other stills and video in the project, here a woman dressed in white faces a tree with petals covering its branches and on the ground beneath it. In a related piece, Weems has spoken for the woman: “With one step, she can be in the future in an instant or in the past, or in the moment. The now. But to get to the now, to this moment, she needs to look back over the landscape of memory. Lost in memory, the woman faces history. A history with a story that has been told a thousand times before.”
Martine Gutierrez’s Body En Thrall began in the pages of her self-produced fashion magazine Indigenous Woman. In the series, the artist embodies a character—here a seductive blonde—who acts alongside male and female mannequins to explore the limits of her own erotic power.
Richard T. Walker incorporates photography, video, music, sculpture, and performance in his work, exploring the relationship between the individual and the changing natural world. Playing with distance and connection, he pairs two framed photographs of a sunset at Mono Lake with bronzed branches originally found at the base of Mount Shasta, suggesting a continuity between the forms. While one photograph is installed nestled in the branch, the other is placed elsewhere in the room, creating a three-dimensional conversation.
Starting in the 1930s, Helen Levitt documented the theater of daily life on the streets of New York, often recording children at play and the markings they left with chalk on sidewalks and buildings. Here, a city kid imagines a world of trees and flowers in the country.
Working with a large and portable camera obscura of his own construction, Richard Learoyd has journeyed outside of his London studio, into the art-historically rich English countryside, producing images that have long been latent in his imagination. Inspired by the English landscape painter John Constable’s sketches of willow trees, Learoyd seeks to draw with light the movement of many fluttering leaves.
Elisheva Biernoff’s hypnotically detailed works are based on found, anonymous photographs, which she recreates as small paintings, rendered as faithfully as possible. By paying close attention to old photographs, she gives them new life. “One might think of her as the ultimate caretaker of lost memories: of the singular moments of others who are, perhaps, no longer able to, or lack the desire to, remember those events themselves,” writes Apsara DiQuinzio, senior curator of contemporary art at the Nevada Museum of Art, where Biernoff’s exhibition Reservoirs of Time is on view until April 21, 2024.
