Art Out: Terry Evans Ancient Prairies and Got a Feeling ‘21 Is Going to be a Good Year
Spring Bur Oak, 2019. Archival pigment print, 40 x 55 inches. © Terry Evans, Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson, New York
Yancey Richardson is proud to present Ancient Prairies, an exhibition of new photographs by Chicago-based artist Terry Evans. Marking her fourth exhibition at the gallery, Evans expands on her decades- long connection with the prairie as the spiritual center of her work.
Through the creation of photographic mosaics of these ecosystems, Evans explores the complexity of the prairie landscape, the element of time in landscape photography and the delicate relationship between nature and humankind.
Since 1978, Evans’s work has been shaped by her inquiry and exploration of the American prairie. From detailed ground-level studies of intricate botanical life to aerial photographs in her series Inhabited Prairie, Evans’s investigations reveal the contradictions, mysteries and beauty of this seemingly mute landscape. The series Ancient Prairies focuses on restored prairies that endure due to human care. Each image comprises dozens of individual photographs of the same site, taken over many days from different perspectives and across varying weather conditions. The resulting images are dynamic studies of place and time, imbued with a Cubist-like sense of visual connections and interruptions, and ultimately forming a cohesive whole conveying the artist’s deeply personal experience of a particular place. For example, Night, April 2020 comprises photographs made each day over the period of a month on evening walks taken while sheltering on her Kansas farm during the early stage of the pandemic. The resulting image presents a patchwork of rectilinear violet hues, punctuated by two moons, a shooting star and the silhouette of her husband, her lone companion, on the distant horizon.
The show is on view from January 14 – February 20, 2021, F or more infomation about the show please click here.
Cig Harvey, Goldfinch, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2014, Archival pigment print, 40 x 40 inches, edition of 5, © Cig Harvey, Courtesy Robert Mann Gallery
NASA, Blue Marble, December 7, 1972, Dye transfer print, 21.5 x 22 inches, Courtesy Robert Mann Gallery
An exhibition about hope - takes its timely title from the lyrics of The Who’s song “1921.” The exhibition includes a selection of works by both classical and contemporary photographers where the underlying theme is positivity and optimism - an important feeling many of us desperately need to hang on to following the dismal year we have all just lived through!
As The Who’s song referred to a reunited couple looking ahead to better times following WWI, similarly, our exhibition seeks to present uplifting images to remind us there are better days ahead! Especially now that there are cures in play for the political, social and medical viruses we have been afflicted with.
From the classic Blue Marble NASA image taken from Apollo 17 in 1972 to Murray Frederick’s Vanity series where our gaze is redirected from ourselves and into our surrounding mesmerizing desert environment to Richard Misrach’s mystical and spiritual images of Stonehenge to Ansel Adams Mount Williamson from Manzanar which was described by Edward Steichen as an image representing the birth of mankind on planet earth. All these landscape images inspire hope for our planet which has been seriously neglected as of late.
Cig Harvey’s Goldfinch depicting a hand releasing a bird signifies the letting go of anxieties and becoming free and unencumbered while John Mack’s Mazatian, Sinaloa, Mexico image shows a diver high on a platform with arms wide open while below him a couple embraces, both ready to accept a new and better future.
Works that address this timely theme by artists including Jeff Brouws, Elijah Gown, Michael Kenna, Ed Sievers and Aaron Siskind will also be on view.
Art has always been used to communicate messages, to inspire people to act and to think. After the year we’ve all just had we hope the works in this exhibition provide an uplifting experience, filling the viewer with hope and positivity for the year ahead.
The show will be on view by appointment and online from January 15 - March 13, 2021. For additional information and press materials, contact the gallery by email (mail@robertmann.com).
