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The Sun, Trying to Disappear | Group Exhibition

February 1 - May 4

The Sun, Trying to Disappear | Sara Cwynar, Kate Greene, Ian Kline, Elle Perez, Lieko Shiga, + Carmen Winant
Curated by Dylan Hausthor
February 1 – May 4 2025

The Sun, Trying to Disappear is a show that speaks of entanglement. The images in this exhibition flutter between icons and mistrusted memories; dumpster-found advertisements; and miracles of moments that feel fully divine. As we all wade through systems that try to engulf us, the six featured artists use their imaginations as a way to survive above the flames. They may be above them, but they’re looking directly at them.

The sun – as the source of the world’s shadows – is what gives these six artists their relentless curiosity. If falsehoods are illuminated, can we more clearly see the systems that we live under? Each of these photographers creates work that references histories of utopia, futurism, landscape, and defiance specific to their own community. Adjacent to the systems of destruction that they photograph – natural disasters, the melting of late-stage capitalism, the forced control of bodies, or haunted landscapes –  the artists reveal flickering candle-lit gasps of staggering beauty. They do not address the world with hope-based sermons communicated through imagery but rely on alternative phenomenology, fiction, self, and wonder as modes of transcendence to extend past oppression. Spaces and characters that we recognize are made visible to us at a glance before we are dragged deeper into the specificity of the artist’s worlds. We may be reading one story, but they may be telling another one. 

Image-making necessarily cannot be of the inside. The process of seeing weaves together the physiological, the genetic, and, perhaps most importantly, the memetic (relating to memes). The artists represented in The Sun, Trying to Disappear do not endeavor to impose iconography onto matter, but act to uncover the invisible. We cannot fully see the systems that we move through, but the stories in this exhibition allow us to gently lift the curtain so we can peer in at them from the outside.

The sun can never see the shadows that it casts, but we can.

Dylan Hausthor, Guest Curator

 

About the artists

Lieko Shiga reckons with natural disasters through images of doom and modes of community activism. Her large-scale images reject photography’s traditional mirror/window dichotomy – they act instead as portraits of a delicate and psychic state that feels primarily internal and haunted.

Kate Greene’s work leans towards the recognizable until it tumbles into the mystical. Her images drip with a perspective that transcends something knowable. In Greene’s work, the landscape holds power. The threats that humanity puts on the land are filtered through her lens, and suddenly, we are not dangerous to the land; it is dangerous to us.

Elle Pérez is hope. Their work simmers, slowly cooking off until you’re left with something so pungent it’s profound. Their images come from a lineage of mosh-pit-like energy – punk denialism, demanding a new future of safety. Their work sees through photographic histories of fiction, violence, and hope, and leaves the viewer with a deeply authentic vulnerability.

The side-eye energy of Sara Cwynar’s images pulls the viewer inward. Her work reminds us of relationships with the things we see, the things we buy, and the things we’re desperate to gain meaning from. Dystopia and utopia are in lockstep with commodity throughout her work – and the hyperreality of an organized world gives it less sense.

Ian Kline’s practice is one of miracle-seeking. Traditional questions of reality aren’t important to him. His world seems to leak the divine, washed out by color giving way to a haunted place that you recognize. You have memories there. That lake is a place where you went skinny dipping in high school, that car is the same model as the one that your aunt drove into a tree, and that red is the same color as the back of your eyelids during midwinter. Kline knows the world that we live in and shoplifts from it.

This showing of Carmen Winant’s The neighbor, the friend, the lover, acts as another step in a consistently recontextualized (or decontextualized?) icons of archive – double-sided book and magazine pages that, when put in the “correct” light, seem to cast a new spell. Winant’s work demands autonomy. This piece of Winant’s was originally gestated after finding a stack of National Geographic magazines at a dump in Skowhegan, Maine.

 

About the curator

Dylan Hausthor is an artist based on an island off the coast of Maine. They received their BFA from Maine College of Art and MFA from Yale School of Art. They work teaching ghost hunting, ritual, photography, and mushroom foraging. To help write this biography, Dylan contacted a forensic medium, who suggested that they “seemed like someone who was passionate in the things they believed in, hides secret messages in the things they have to say, and should avoid driving Volvos.” They are a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow.


Header image: Ian Kline, In end light, 2021, Archival Pigment, Print, 40”x50”.

Footer image: Sara Cwynar, 141 Pictures of Sophie 1, 2 and 3, 2019, Edition of 3 with 2 AP, Archival pigment print mounted to Dibond, Triptych, 46.5 x 37.0 in. (118.11 x 93.98 cm). Courtesy of The Approach, London and Cooper Cole Gallery, Toronto.

Details

Start:
February 1
End:
May 4
Event Category:
Event Tags:
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Venue

Bruce Brown Gallery

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