Written by Max Wiener

Photo Edited by Kelly Woodyard

With merely words, “Los Angeles” evokes a certain feeling few cities possess. The lights on Sunset blend seamlessly with the trees on Beverly. Simultaneously, it paints a picture of a city built on success and fame. Julian Charrière, in his stunning series Buried Sunshine, proves that the City of Angels is built on resources reaching far beyond film cameras and spray tans. In his third series with Sean Kelly’s New York location, he further examines both the human relationship with natural land and the implications associated with it. Like the scripts and sequences of Hollywood, Charrière’s images aim to warp our sense of reality and of our very worlds’s infrastructure. Opened on January 12th, the series, marking its move from the Los Angeles gallery location, has a scheduled closing date of March 2nd.

Buried Sunshine, when displayed in New York, holds a different curatorial feel. Examining these images within the city’s crowded confines arises distinctive feelings, emotions, and behaviors. While examining the oil topography in the corresponding city, it proves to be no less humbling in the Big Apple. Charrière’s work has a truly uncanny ability to be impactful- regardless of setting or context. Ultimately, his photographic and artistic style transcend state lines and allow people from all walks of life to have a shared experience with each momentous work.

Accompanying the exhibition is Charrière’s film Controlled Burn. The pieces serve as a firsthand look at what is quite literally America’s underbelly. Filmed with a drone, Charrière takes us through decommissioned oil rigs, open pit coal mines, and rusting cooling towers; it has a Werner Herzog-type feel to it. In doing so, it presents viewers with unavoidable feelings of doom and gloom. Fossil fuels, in his film, are the enemy, and whatever we can do to distance ourselves from them will save us. Emblematic of his moral values, Charrière brings us directly to the source and lets us experience it for ourselves. It makes the images of Buried Sunshine all the more powerful.

Perhaps Charrière’s greatest ability as an artist is to restore humility in his viewers. He distracts them from the woes of the material world, while bringing them back to their roots. The images suggest a crisis, proving that there is something much greater going on in the world than award shows or social media. It’s quite stirring, and truly imposing to look at LA before its glitz and glamor. Questions are subsequently evoked: have we stripped the world of its natural beauty? We sit on wealths of a finite resource we have

bent our entire lives to rely on - what happens when we run out? What if another country holds our necessary resources and we battle them for it? Buried Sunshine might just have the answers to these questions.

Feb 23 Julian Charrière: Buried Sunshine | Sean Kelly Gallery

Feb 23 Einstein and the Bomb (2023) | Dir. Anthony Philipson

Feb 23 Hector Villalobos

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