Safe-T-Gallery is pleased to
announce an exhibition of large-scale, black and white photographs
by Brooklyn artist Michael
Meyer. Meyer’s show, “Direct Forms,” emerges from
his carefully conceived and imaginative examination of photographic
degradation.
The exhibit runs from January 19 to February 25th, with a reception
for the artist on January 19th from 6 to 8.
Michael Meyer’s photographs in “Direct Forms” are works
that are both highly interventional and yet avidly infused with a Cagean
embrace of chance. Bluntly, we are looking at prints made from traditional
photographic negatives that have been allowed to slowly deteriorate under
unfavorable conditions (excessive soaking and cycles of moisture and
drying being two favorites.) Although the products of chance and entropy,
the resulting images are filled with form and texture, they are both
stark and intensely beautiful. We can discern vast landscapes reminiscent
of satellite images of the Earth — or Mars, there are close-ups
of the skins of Komodo dragons, and the paths of anti-matter particles
captured in an elaborate bubble chambers. In the prints we may see the
overall sweep of a landscape photograph, but because we are really looking
at the structure of the negative itself, even the smallest details are
perfectly revealed. Many of the forms in the prints have geological analogies,
but then the forces at work on the surface of the earth – time,
water and gravity – are the same used by Meyer to produce his
negatives.
For most of the history of photography much effort has been made
to make the presence of the negative totally invisible in the final
prints.
Now,
in the beginning of the age of non-negative photography, we have
an exhibition highlighting the form of the negative itself. Meyer
has
eschewed one
traditional role of photography – capturing the world as we see
it – but embraced a second, documenting unknown parts of reality
that we would not otherwise see.
Michael Meyer is a recent graduate of the NYU Tisch School of the
Arts. “Direct
Forms” will be his first one-person exhibition at a commercial
gallery.
