I'll be your mirror

Pop-up show April 30-May 1, 2016
Wayfarers, 1109 Dekalb Avenue, Brooklyn, New York 11221
Opening 7-10pm, Saturday April 30th

Any child abed in lazy and luxurious convalescence from measles or chicken pox, half-drunk with tea and hot lemonade, learns that the space between the window shade and the casement is a magic place, populated by spirits that cast their shifting, liquid shadows on the screen and tap out their secret messages on the window frame. Once each of us was open to such dramas of the senses, revealed in terms that were trivial and ephemeral: the reflection of the hand mirror on the dressing table, slowly tracing its elliptical course across the ceiling.

Many of us forget the existence of such experiences when we learn to measure the priorities of practical life; some of us remember their existence but find that in the light of day they have become as shy and evasive as the hermit thrush; a few, whom we call artists, maintain an easy intimacy with the wonders of simple perception. In this century many of these have been photographers, and the exploration of our fundamental sensory experience has been in large part their work. It is photography that has continued to teach us of the pleasure and the adventure of disinterested seeing.

----Excerpt from John Szarkowski, Looking at Photographs

Is it not the back channels that constitute the strongest connections? Four artists linked for a decade but dispersed among Los Angeles, Wichita, Memphis and New York connect sky and ground, as well as absent-minded daydreaming and acute empiricism to put together the space between moments in this exhibit of photography.  The sky is perhaps the world's original reflection, and capturing the passing of light, be it observed through human structures or with human tools, has allowed O'Leary, Phillips, Parker and Robinson to arrive at an everyday monasticism and a synthesis of competing forces.  These photographs pick up on the smallest clues that point to larger truths.