Bryan Graf

Optical Research

August 14 – September 26, 2020

HOME SCHOOL_BRIAN GRAF_8_13_20 from colby caldwell on Vimeo.

HOME SCHOOL 8/13/20: Artist Bryan Graf in Conversation (in conjunction with "Optical Research" opening at Tracey Morgan Gallery)
This is an archived recording of a preview and artist talk with CJ Heyliger, Erin Hyde Nolan, and the artist to discuss his new show that opens Friday August 14th at Tracey Morgan Gallery.

ABOUT BRYAN GRAF
Bryan Graf navigates the photographic medium with a discursive interest in the history of photography and its relationship to design, painting, and narrative fiction. His practice involves mixing photography-based images that have visceral, optical and conceptual relationships.

He received an MFA from Yale University in 2008 and a BFA from the Art Institute of Boston in 2005. Graf has held solo shows nationally and internationally. His work has been exhibited at Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, GA; The George Eastman House Museum, Rochester, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, Maine; and DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, Massachusetts. Graf was a 2016 recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.

Grafʼs work has appeared in numerous publications, including Blind Spot, Details, Harpers and The New York Times among others. He has published four books.

CJ Heyliger is a photo-based artist whose work assesses the veracity of the photographic image in relation to human perception and experience. His work has been exhibited internationally including The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA, The Columbus Museum of Art in Columbus, OH, The Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, CA, Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York, and Geste in Paris, France. Heyliger is represented by Gallery Luisotti in Los Angeles, CA where he is currently part of the group exhibition “Four Artists” with Lewis Baltz, John Divola, and Christina Fernandez. He is a visiting lecturer at San Diego State University, where he lives and works.

Erin Hyde Nolan is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Maine College of Art where she teaches
courses on the history of photography, Islamic Art, and global modernism. She received her PhD from Boston University in 2017.

Her research on photographic culture from the Islamic world has been published in academic journals such as Ars Orientalis and the Trans Asia Photography Review. Her current book manuscript, Portrait Atlas: The Circulation of Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Portrait Photographs, examines representations of identity and power, selfhood and cultural belonging in the long nineteenth century across the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds. Two collaborative projects in which Hyde Nolan is currently engaged include: a co-edited volume, Survey Practices and Landscape Photography Across the Globe, on photographic land surveys in the majority world (Routledge 2022); and a co-curated exhibition, Outside of the Frame: Todd Webb in Africa, which presents newly discovered photographs by Todd Webb that have yet to be exhibited or published in their original format. Commissioned by the United Nations to document industry and technology in 1958, Webb’s photographs raise deep questions about agency and power, positionality and privilege, travel and tourism, and the ways modernization is documented in the context of the African continent. The exhibition will open at the Minneapolis Institute of Art in March 2021. It will be accompanied by a book of the same name and published by Thames & Hudson in 2021.

Her scholarship has been supported by the Kunsthistorisches Institut-Florenz, Max-Planck
Society, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Historians of Islamic Art, and Getty Research Institute,
among others. Before attending graduate school, Hyde Nolan worked at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Harvard Art Museums, Morgan Library & Museum and Todd Webb Archive.

 

Press Release

Tracey Morgan Gallery is pleased to present Optical Research, an exhibition of new photo-based works by Bryan Graf. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The show brings together works that examine perception, memory, and nature. All of the works, varied at times as they are, are unified through a reflected research into the phenomenology of photography. These works collectively examine how photography moves against consciousness; one constant, the other static - with their roles constantly shifting.

We see this nuanced examination throughout the exhibition. The striking diptych, Turning Back (Quickly Panning), Turning Back (Slowly Panning), was made in a particular spot on a walking path where both directions are nearly identical, creating a visual palindrome. Both images were made using long exposures with the same set of variables, but one made while panning the camera quickly, and the other, panning slowly. The resulting images engage with the same place, but with unique manipulations of time and space. Through the installation, Reflected Projections Projecting Reflections, Graf is examining the relationship between optical sensation and the language of perception. The piece is a modular installation composed of mirrors, a slide projector, and transparency slides made from screen material cut down from the scraps of large geometric abstractions. These images are amplified through the slide projector and a corresponding grid of mirrors on the opposite wall – reflecting back images to the source of their projection. The slides are on an endless loop, with the slides changing at the average interval at which we blink our eyes. 

Graf continues this exploration through the piece Random Walks, a series of transparencies installed across the front windows of the gallery. Inspired by the mathematical theory of the same name as well as the surrealist practice of automatism, this piece was created using materials, both organic and inorganic, that Graf collected on a day’s walk. He brought the collected objects into the darkroom and made blind traces (quite literally, because color darkroom paper is sensitive to the entire visible light spectrum, forcing him to work in complete darkness) of each object with color filters taped to a handheld flash. The resulting images are both a record of the days walk, and a visualization of the unconscious mind as an exercise in creative practice.

The Shot / Reverse Shot series disassembles and reconstructs the darkroom process, a sort of visual instruction manual for making photograms. The images show both the paper being exposed by the camera’s flash (the shot) and the resulting photogram (the reverse shot). The Shot / Reverse Shot diptychs stemmed from a desire to record the objects as they are versus having to decontextualize the materials from the landscape by bringing them into the darkroom. This work was simultaneously informed by a book of interviews Graf was reading with Jean-Luc Godard who spoke about the shot / reverse shot technique in cinema being all wrong - the person speaking should be filmed over the listener's shoulder for the shot and the reverse shot should rotate to film the listener's reaction. This made Graf occupied with how to make a shot / reverse shot with still images, while simultaneously pursuing the desire to make a photogram outside. About these works, the artist states, “The four new Shot / Reverse Shot works in this show were produced in the garden that surrounds my studio in New Jersey. They were made at the end of July during a heat wave one night this summer. I hadn’t been back there since the pandemic started and it was amazing to see what a jungle it had become. The studio is located behind the house I grew up in, where my parents still live. It was my mother’s studio when I was growing up, where she painted and taught the neighborhood kids art lessons in the summer. As time went on, I started to use the studio and a lot of my work has been inspired by that modest structure and the surrounding garden, which my father still tends to. These Shot / Reverse Shot’s were made with the help of my mother taking the photographs to expose the paper, and my father’s nimble touch for letting the garden grow as it will. I’m very fortunate to have them both still in my life and healthy. I think these works are, in a way, a collaboration between three gardeners; each of us chipping in what we can to keep things growing while we’re here.”  

Graf received an MFA from Yale University in 2008 and a BFA from the Art Institute of Boston in 2005. His work has been exhibited at Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, GA; The George Eastman House Museum, Rochester, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, Maine; and DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, Massachusetts. Graf was a 2016 recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Grafʼs work has appeared in numerous publications, including Blind Spot, Details, Harpers and The New York Times among others. He has published four books: Wildlife Analysis (Conveyor, 2013); Moving Across the Interior (ICA@MECA, 2014); Prismatic Tracks (Conveyor, 2014); and Debris of The Days (Conveyor 2017). His work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Portland Museum of Art, The Victoria and Albert Museum, Harvard University, Yale University, International Center of Photography, and the Tokyo Institute of Photography.

For additional information or images, please email info@traceymorgangallery 

 

Image: Bryan Graf, Reflected Projections Projecting Reflections, installation view, dimensions variable

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