Photography Exhibition Yoav Horesh & Shawn Bush

Gallery Kayafas, Boston is pleased to present Yoav Horesh’s Serene Oasis and Shawn Bush’s A Golden State series.

Horesh’s photographs examine conflict, human tragedy, memory, and recovery. He has travelled extensively since 2001, photographing in Europe, Asia and America. His travels bring him to historic “sites” where his focus is searching for cultural clues and personal histories – his personal connection to place. His evolving practice has grown from “street photography” to large format landscapes, interiors and portraits that open up the discussion between the present and history. His projects also took him to the American Southwest, Germany, Laos, Israel, the Gaza Strip and Cambodia, where history still shapes and influences current events and life.

Serene Oasis brings Horesh back to Israel and places him in the middle of a neighborhood known as Neve Sha’anan. Established originally in the 1920’s by Jewish immigrants, the area today is a small and very poor neighborhood which has become home to thousands of immigrants and refugees from Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa. Horesh’s gelatin-silver prints depict the current residents and physical structures which define their home.

Shawn Bush’s work appropriates and reconstructs tropes of popular American culture to reflect the fallacy of Western influence within its own domain. By focusing on media trends and the dissemination of unconscious ideologies, he uses the authority of prescriptive media as a blueprint for deconstructing the standards it represents. Bush’s color photographs of boundless Western landscapes reveal the new West’s current identity…no longer glamorized or idealized, Bush’s new West is ripe in pop culture and Americana.

The Western landscape has captivated the hearts of Americans and others over time. The expansive topography that dominates the territory encapsulates the allure that defines core American ideologies. Cinema, habitual media and commercial industries use the seduction of the Western landscape to sell, define and project a merit of social status. In the name of progress, the topography is constantly changing and shedding its layers to suit the conditional needs of humanity. Employing some of the tactics of cinema that have been used to describe the landscape, A Golden State questions the relationship of prescriptive identity to place.

Read more at http://www.gallerykayafas.com/