Jackson Fine Art presents Meghann Riepenhoff and Richard Misrach in a two-person exhibition entitled Duet. For the fourth exhibition of their inaugural year at 3122 East Shadowlawn, Duet reasserts the gallery’s commitment to bringing together through a common curatorial thread the best artists of the 20th and 21st centuries across traditional and innovative photo-based mediums. Misrach, one of the most influential photographers of his generation, has come to be nearly synonymous with the American West, photographing vast and empty deserts and sites at the margin where human impact on the environment has resulted in a greater sense of existential uncertainty. Misrach acted as a mentor to Riepenhoff, an Atlanta native, in her early years as a working photographer in San Francisco — this exhibition celebrates the harmonious creative relationship between these two artists, and the importance of the teacher-student relationship to the continuation of the photographic tradition. Curated from each artist’s most recent series, Riepenhoff’s Ice and Misrach’s Notations, Duet acknowledges the constant evolution of two artists deeply invested in pushing the limits of their own practice — and each other’s.
Meghann Riepenhoff creates dynamic camera-less cyanotypes, employing one of the earliest photographic processes to examine humans’ relationship with the environment and our impermanent place within it. Ice continues her practice of allowing her materials to interact organically with the elements — waves, surface water, rain, snow, and sediment leave physical inscriptions through their direct contact with photographic paper. Made in waters ranging from Walden Pond to remote creeks in western Washington, the Ice compositions selected for Riepenhoff’s second exhibition at Jackson Fine Art are full of subtle details, each expressing a slightly different temperature, type of water, and crystalline structure.
The photographs comprising Misrach’s Notations began in concert with the photographer’s 2006 departure from analog photography to working exclusively digitally. In this debut exhibition at 3122, we are able to explore this shift toward an increasing interest in the photographic negative — an object rendered obsolete by digital photography’s advent. For the works in Notations, Misrach creates a color negative of his sparsely populated landscapes, a process he describes as making a positive a negative, thereby “making the familiar unfamiliar to force us into a deeper awareness of our world and surroundings, as well as our own actions.” Inspired by Ansel Adam’s comparison of a pnegative to a musical score — in that it can be oriented, printed, and exhibited in myriad ways — and by John Cage’s 1969 book Notations, for which the avant-garde composer reinterprets and re-presents the scores of a selection of musicians as visual art. In 2023, Misrach collaborated with Alonzo King LINES Ballet, creating large-scale visuals to back the company’s heart-stirring choreography.
Also on view will be a selection of newly released silver gelatin prints from Yamamoto Masao’s ongoing Tomosu series, as well as unique ambrotypes, wet collodion plates varnished by the artist and floated within handmade frames.
Tomosu, meaning to “to put a little light in the darkness,” evinces Yamamoto’s quiet interest in the human form and the natural world, and the ambrotypes’ process, reliant on chance, serve as a nice complement to the Misrach and Riepenhoff works.
About Meghann Riepenhoff
With her cameraless photographs, Meghann Riepenhoff (b. 1979; Atlanta, GA) captures the ebb and flow of time, examining humans’ relationship with the environment and our impermanent place within it. The artist creates cyanotypes, a process that entails exposing chemically treated paper to ultraviolet light. Riepenhoff places the paper on the shorelines of rivers and oceans, letting wind, water, and sediment imprint on the paper’s surface. Other times, the artist exposes the paper to rain, snow, or ice, revealing crystals, droplets, and kaleidoscopic patterns created by the elements. This is Riepenhoff’s 2nd exhibition with Jackson Fine Art.
About Richard Misrach
Richard Misrach (b. 1949) is one of the most influential photographers working today. For the past 50 years, he has used visually stunning, large-scale color vistas to address human intervention on the natural world. His best-known epic series, Desert Cantos— 39 distinct and interrelated chapters about the western landscape—includes Border Cantos made in collaboration with the experimental composer/sculptor Guillermo Galindo. Dealing with the unseen realities of the US-Mexico borderlands, this show, organized by the San Jose Museum of Art in 2016, and reconfigured by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, has so far traveled to 12 museums. Other significant series include Misrach’s Golden Gate study of weather and light, his exploration of the polluted cancer alley of Louisiana, his haunting documentation of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and his aerial views of ocean and beach in Hawaii. A year-long exhibit of his early Telegraph 3AM series is currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art. He lives and works in Berkeley, California. This is Misrach’s first exhibition with Jackson Fine Art.
Meghann Riepenhoff & Richard Misrach : Duet
October 5 — December 22, 2023
Jackson Fine Art
3122 East Shadowlawn Ave.
Atlanta GA 30305
www.jacksonfineart.com
