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Grace Oh
Humanature IIEdgar Varela Fine Arts
542 S. Alameda Street, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles
www.edgarvarelafinearts.com
Humanature II
Los Angeles-based photographer Grace Oh makes black-and-white photographs that examine people, the natural world, and in particular the contours of the correspondence between them. Humanature II, as the title suggests, follows up on a previous iteration of the project in which Oh juxtaposes the human body with elements of nature, draping nudes across rock formations for example, in poetically suggestive pairings expressing the artist's view that all things in, on, and of the world are one. Curiously, the sequel features almost no people, yet in depopulating her images, she does not take the "human" out of the equation. Instead, she transfers that role to the viewer, engaging the audience in the dialog directly rather than statically depicting it. This effect is particularly pronounced in both Crown and Birth, in which views of wistful, breeze-rustled treetops splash against pale skies, as seen from the point of view of a child lying on the grass beneath them. The images are not only compelling in their near-abstraction but evocative in their specificity as to the twin experiences of place and memory.
In fact, there are qualities particular to photography that ought to be embraced rather than glossed over. For example, its illusion of direct experience, its promise of vicarious pleasure, of perception relayed rather than imagined. It's meant to be the closest thing to being there, even as it can be made to seek out and articulate the shy truths below the surface of things, what Stieglitz called "a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality." The use of black and white is operative as it both distills information and underscores the picture's authorship, its quality of having been made, or at least mediated. Yet in eschewing the flashy sleight of hand of contemporary technological flourishes, Oh is not merely pursuing some sentimental atavism or righteous formal purism. She is excavating the origins of her medium, and applying its lessons to the world of today. Oh shirks the burden of relentless Modernism in favor of an unapologetically lyrical, spiritual, sensual humanism -- and rehabilitates the relevance of photography's first giants.
In fact, there are qualities particular to photography that ought to be embraced rather than glossed over. For example, its illusion of direct experience, its promise of vicarious pleasure, of perception relayed rather than imagined. It's meant to be the closest thing to being there, even as it can be made to seek out and articulate the shy truths below the surface of things, what Stieglitz called "a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality." The use of black and white is operative as it both distills information and underscores the picture's authorship, its quality of having been made, or at least mediated. Yet in eschewing the flashy sleight of hand of contemporary technological flourishes, Oh is not merely pursuing some sentimental atavism or righteous formal purism. She is excavating the origins of her medium, and applying its lessons to the world of today. Oh shirks the burden of relentless Modernism in favor of an unapologetically lyrical, spiritual, sensual humanism -- and rehabilitates the relevance of photography's first giants.