Un percorso di ricerca e forma molto interessante quello di Emmet Gowin proposto dalla Pace Gallery di New York.
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Pace Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of photographs by Emmet Gowin, a key figure in the history of photography who has explored humanity’s relationship to the natural world for six decades. On view at Pace’s 540 West 25th Street space in New York from March 25 to April 30, the presentation spotlights aerial images of
center-pivot irrigation circles on farms in the American West and Midwest. Made over the course of a decade beginning in 1987, these photographs are the subject of the forthcoming monograph The One Hundred Circle Farm,
published by Princeton University Press and set to be released in the US on April 19. Pace’s exhibition, which takes its title from Gowin’s upcoming book, represents the artist’s first major presentation with the gallery.
Throughout his career, Gowin has captured images of landscapes around the world as well as intimate portraits of family members. His powerful and contemplative photographs offer meditations on the complexities of personhood and family, on humanity’s relationship to the natural world, and on industry’s toll on the Earth. Having studied under the famed photographer Harry Callahan at the Rhode Island School of Design during the 1960s, the artist served as a professor of photography at Princeton University from 1973 until his retirement in 2009.
Pace’s show includes some 30 pigment prints from Gowin’s series of circular farms, many of which have been printed for the first time. Most of the works in the exhibition also figure in Gowin’s upcoming publication. Each of these varied images depicts otherworldly formations of land and natural phenomena as seen by the artist from a bird’s eye view of a small aircraft. Depicting scars left by industry as well as traces of geological and climatic processes, the works in this series can be understood as studies of mark-making on the Earth. These images invite reflection on timely questions of sustainability, agricultural practices, and water use through a visual language that often borders on abstraction.
In contrast to their visual dynamism and beauty, the images in this body of work are indices of urgent environmental issues, pointing to the ties between land destruction, water scarcity, and center-pivot agriculture. Ostensibly investigations of form and light, Gowin’s images remain inextricable from contemporary anxieties surrounding climate change, offering prophetic visions of humanity’s troubled relationship to and exploitation of the natural world.
