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Sophie Calle’s Because, (January 23, 2020 - March 13, 2020)

Time and again Sophie Calle has proven that there is harmony in pairing text and images to create a captivating narrative.

For almost 40 years Calle has masterfully captured intimate moments and shared them with the public in installations such as Because. She often draws inspiration from difficult moments in her personal life and her photos and poems explore themes such as love, death, memory, and loss.

Because is a shining example of Calle’s continued fascination with the connections between narrative memory and photography, and her unique ability to combine humor and melancholy while also including bouts of irony.

In each piece, a velvet curtain embroidered with Calle’s writing covers a hidden photograph behind it, sometimes giving small glances and hints as to what awaits the viewers behind the curtain. The text/poem that starts with the word “because” elucidates the reason why the image exists, why the artist chose this specific place or time.

The justification for the photograph can thus be understood before the image and by doing so Calle breaks the conventional mold in which images are usually read; this “hidden effect” aids in creating mystery and surprise for the viewer.

“La Coupole, 2018, Because the waiters, upon leaving, make a gift of their shirts, their ties or their bowties to me; Because it's the last check; Because I'm the last client; Because it will lose its soul; Because of pangs of sadness.” Calle, with her text and photography, calls attention to things that are often left behind, things forgotten, things misplaced and a sadness for things that will not outlast the sands of time. There is a certain appreciation for the here and now whilst also a foreboding sense of nostalgia because of the possessed knowledge of impending doom.

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Opticks, (March 14, 2020 - August 15, 2020)

Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in 1948 in Japan, and spends his time between Tokyo and New York City. He has primarily been a photographer since the 1970s.

Opticks 156, 2018. chromogenic print © Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Opticks 138, 2018. chromogenic print. © Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

In his series, Opticks, Sugimoto is recreating Newton’s prism experiment. Our modern understanding of light and color begins with Isaac Newton and a series of experiments that he published in 1672. He was the first to understand the rainbow — refracting white light with a prism, resolving it into its component colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet.

Sugimoto knew that for this series, the environment would be the key to his photography, so he would await winter each year before shooting. Sugimoto describes the process as “ Traveling through the cold winter air, the light is split, then drawn into the dim observation chamber, where it is projected on the white plaster wall at exaggerated size. The profundity of the color gradation is overwhelming. I have the sense that I can see particles of light, and that each of those individual particles is a subtly different color from the next one. Red to yellow, yellow to green, then green to blue — the projected colors contain an infinity of tones and change every moment.”