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March 2006
It is a small exhibition, yet large in scope. Created after
several trips near the Napo and Amazon rivers, the works are
small in scale - yet, like Bonsai trees, they sum up and concentrate
an entire landscape. Gowin expresses this very thought when
he writes: “While there may be only a hint of the forest
itself in these images, this work would be impossible without
the forest.” Gowin fuses into his subject matter, is
drawn into its spell by “the mixed sense of miracle,
the feeling of having fallen into an underworld where both
fear and delight combine to confound our perceptions.”
In his photographs the frontiers between a body and the world
are porous. Each of us contains the earth.
A keen observer and lover of nature since his family moved
to Chincoteague Island in Virginia when he was a boy, Gowin
was always attracted to science. He was still a student when
his friend and mentor, Frederick Sommer, lent him Werner Heisenberg’s
“ Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations.”
Later on he became an avid reader of 19th century naturalist
Fabre ‘s “Insect World.” Gowin thought that
he could find the answers to his search for beauty at the
crossroads of art and science.
[ Click
above to view works ] |
Even though the insects, moths and butterflies represented
in this new series have been captured near the border of Colombia
and Panama, close to the Amazon river, they allude to a previous
experience that took place near his home in Virginia: one
summer thirty years ago, when his children were small, they
collected almost a thousand different species of insects in
their yard and the neighboring forest. At that time Gowin
made a photograph of a worn, open book, with half-erased characters,
on which he had emptied the content of a box of dead insects
gathered by his children on a windowsill. But on the photograph
the insects seem alive, as if they had been generated by the
page to better express its poetry.
In this current show, too, imprints of butterflies and moths,
at times combined with friezes of black silhouettes of couples
making love, evoke Hippolyte Bayard’s early contact
prints of lace, flowers and ferns. Loosely aligned onto the
picture’s space, they seem to write, in an alphabet
of wings, an indecipherable message.
Gown’s pictures are delicate assemblages of negative
silhouettes, projections of beings that are half way between
presence and absence, fact and memory. While some of his portraits
of Edith are done in her presence - such as the two in square
format where she is surrounded by the electric and trembling
spiral of a moth in flight - most are evocations constructed
in the darkroom with cutouts of her face done previously,
as if accumulating within their contour different times and
spaces. The forest seems to have leaked like a river within
the shell of her face or body, as in the portrait where her
features are obscured by an intricate mask of leaves that
imprints itself, drawing on her darkened skin a strange geography,
leaving her mouth and orbits in deep shadows. In another portrait
moths fly within her face, tracing wild, thin tornadoes of
light that look like vine tendrils, barbed wire, dancing atoms.
A specific experience was at the root of Gowin’s present
series: he was traveling in the daylight obscurity of the
tropical forest with an Ecuadorian guide who then used an
ultraviolet flash light to bring into view a world of insect
life that was invisible to the eye. This beam of light that,
for a fleeting moment, brings the invisible into the visible
is a perfect metaphor for Gowin’s photography. Drawn
of light and shadow, his dancing forms are like apparitions
or mysterious doubles of our world. Their form tells us both
that they exist and may imminently disappear.
In his search for beauty Gowin always was a visionary, even
when his subject matters seemed evident - his wife and extended
family, landscapes scarred by erosion, explosions or environmental
disasters. As this exhibition makes clear, he belongs - like
his friend and mentor Frederick Sommer - to the tradition
of the alchemists and the Romantics. His work echoes the words
of the 19th century French poet Gérard de Nerval: “Everything
is alive, everything is active, all things correspond to one
another: it is a transparent web that covers the world.”
-- Carole Naggar
Pace McGill Gallery
32 East 57th Street
New York,NY 10022
www.pacemacgill.com
Until April 1,2006
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