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
