David Benjamin Sherry's practice examines the mythologies and iconography of the American Midwest, while opening them up as sites for queer potential. His work bears witness to the changing landscapes of the Western United States. Reinventing the well-trodden views of the country's national parks, Sherry's landscapes are each rendered in a single, vivid color.
In doing so, Sherry seeks to challenge the West’s colonialist trope of the individualist, with all its corollary connotations of straightness, whiteness and maleness, to present a more inclusive discourse around the region and its preservation. Echoing the American landscape photographers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Sherry works with a wooden-framed 8 x 10 inch large format camera. He weaves together the tradition of large-format landscape photography with issues of identity in order to recontextualize and preserve these lands. Sherry mural-prints his color photographs with an alternative darkroom process, in which he creates vibrant monochrome washes that veil each image.
Sherry's first UK exhibition, Mother, is now on view at Huxley-Parlour gallery.
