Von Lintel Gallery presents “Both Directions at Once” by Jeffrey Rothstein, their first exhibition with the artist.
Jeffrey’s work has always pushed boundaries and shattered assumptions. When he reaches an artistic plateau, he climbs even higher, where the heady altitude makes his heart pound. In his new collection, Both Directions at Once, Jeffrey invites the viewer’s gaze on an existential journey, a visual wandering of rock and sky, a pageantry of color that exists exclusively in nature.
The title was inspired by a conversation between John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter about their music going “both directions at once.” Welcoming a personal challenge, Jeffrey abandoned his usual chronological thinking about his work, allowing himself the agency of fluidity, starting in the middle or the end of a project and working back to its inception, so long as each symphonic element shared one resounding refrain.
Music is a guide for Jeffrey – the music he hears in the desert, the trembling of the sand, wind, the formations of stone, and a mental soundtrack by Brian Eno. Each photograph shares a consensus of painterly and photographic mastery, dividing rock and sky into planes of color and vivid texture, reminiscent of the paintings of Maynard Dixon. So too, Jeffrey’s photographs gift the viewer with an experience of open space, a freedom typically reserved for birds and ghosts.
Jeffrey’s images are at once otherworldly and recognizable – the blue buttes of Utah might be the strange, lonesome formations on the surface of Mars. Even in their remarkable scope, the images feel intimate, hallucinatory, transformative. Not beauty simply for the sake of beauty, but an undercurrent of power that is open to interpretation, a kind of soulful reckoning at our own smallness in the scheme of things. – Elizabeth Brundage
Rothstein received his BA from Hampshire College in Massachusetts in 1982. His work has been consistently exhibited in galleries since 1997. His work is also in collections such as The Howard Hughes Foundation, Laurence and Anne-Marie Graff, Maurizio Bertelli, Uma Thurman, Jessica Alba, and The Tarn Collection. The artist lives and works in New York.
Jeffrey Rothstein : Both Directions at Once
Until October 14th, 2023
Von Lintel Gallery
Bergamot Station Arts Center
2525 Michigan Ave, Santa Monica, CA 90404
www.vonlintel.com
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