Artist reception Sat, Feb 2, 4-6pm; Exhibition Feb 2 - Mar 16, 2019 (Tues, Weds, Fri, Sat from 10am-5:30pm, Thurs from 11am-7pm)
In his eighth solo exhibition at Hosfelt Gallery, Michael Light presents a new body of work from his ongoing aerial photographic survey of the arid American West. "Great Basin Autoglyphs and Pleistoseas" ventures into deep time, moving from habited, placed settlements into pure space and its attendant emptiness. The resulting images are abstract and painterly investigations that reveal hitherto unseen terrain imprinted by both human intervention and geological phenomena.
Twelve thousand years ago the Great Basin-that part of the country between California and Utah where water does not drain to the ocean-was 900 feet underwater, covered by two vast and now largely evaporated historical lakes, Bonneville and Lahontan. The remnants of Lake Bonneville today are the Great Salt Lake in Utah and its eponymous salt flats, while the most famous portion of the former Lake Lahontan is the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, an alkali bed that floods and dries each year, creating the flattest land on earth. It is also the location of the annual arts festival Burning Man.
The topographies now exposed by both Pleistocene lakes are the entry points for Light as he continues to pursue themes of mapping, perceptual orientation, geology, and human impact on the land, but here in a more minimal and psychological way. Piloting his 600-pound aircraft at low elevations, he uses a large-format digital camera to capture the vast flatness of the former lakebeds, while back in the studio he applies a hyper-intensification process not unlike X-ray imaging or gravestone rubbing that results in the revelation of impressions, spaces and textures that are indiscernible to the naked eye. While Light has always pushed the boundaries of landscape photography, his approach with this body of work takes a deeper turn into graphic and emotional abstraction.
Artist reception Sat, Feb 2, 4-6pm; Exhibition Feb 2 - Mar 16, 2019 (Tues, Weds, Fri, Sat from 10am-5:30pm, Thurs from 11am-7pm)
In his eighth solo exhibition at Hosfelt Gallery, Michael Light presents a new body of work from his ongoing aerial photographic survey of the arid American West. "Great Basin Autoglyphs and Pleistoseas" ventures into deep time, moving from habited, placed settlements into pure space and its attendant emptiness. The resulting images are abstract and painterly investigations that reveal hitherto unseen terrain imprinted by both human intervention and geological phenomena.
Twelve thousand years ago the Great Basin-that part of the country between California and Utah where water does not drain to the ocean-was 900 feet underwater, covered by two vast and now largely evaporated historical lakes, Bonneville and Lahontan. The remnants of Lake Bonneville today are the Great Salt Lake in Utah and its eponymous salt flats, while the most famous portion of the former Lake Lahontan is the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, an alkali bed that floods and dries each year, creating the flattest land on earth. It is also the location of the annual arts festival Burning Man.
The topographies now exposed by both Pleistocene lakes are the entry points for Light as he continues to pursue themes of mapping, perceptual orientation, geology, and human impact on the land, but here in a more minimal and psychological way. Piloting his 600-pound aircraft at low elevations, he uses a large-format digital camera to capture the vast flatness of the former lakebeds, while back in the studio he applies a hyper-intensification process not unlike X-ray imaging or gravestone rubbing that results in the revelation of impressions, spaces and textures that are indiscernible to the naked eye. While Light has always pushed the boundaries of landscape photography, his approach with this body of work takes a deeper turn into graphic and emotional abstraction.
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