Huxley-Parlour are delighted to present The Waves, an exhibition of new works by David Benjamin Sherry at their Swallow Street gallery. Sherry’s second presentation with the gallery, the exhibition will present a suite of eight large-scale photographs taken in Antarctica last year.
This body of work is both a homecoming and an evolution for Sherry. Turning his lens to an entirely new landscape, with its unique challenges, Sherry continues his exploration of environmental change. For Sherry the project is a reaffirmation of the drive for conservation that has been prescient in all his work, yet Antarctica’s landscape simultaneously offers new mythologies and histories.
Sherry’s ethos of preservation is reflected in his choice of medium. The series is made using both medium and large-format cameras, and developed in the darkroom using traditional film techniques. Employing these analogue technologies in an era of increasing digital manipulation, Sherry seeks to both preserve and reanimate photography’s traditions. His methods situate his practice in the history of landscape photography, following the work of Ansel Adams, Carlton Watkins and other documentarians of the American West. However, Sherry does not simply look to replicate the environments which he photographs; in rendering his images in vivid hues - deep fuschias, cool greens and warm yellows - Sherry’s work takes on an expressive quality. The icebergs and glaciers that he depicts are transformed, by Sherry’s darkroom interventions, into otherworldly forms.
For Sherry, colour can act as a memory or an evocation of feeling. The act of photographing and being immersed in the natural world is a deeply personal, spiritual, and meditative one. In the process, the artist aims to understand humanity’s place in the environment, and the responsibility that comes with it. As a queer artist operating within a genre steeped in masculine traditions, Sherry’s work generates new narratives and understandings of identity and place.
Where his previous work investigated the enduring mythologies of the American West, dominated by redolent symbols of mountains, valleys and ancient trees, Sherry’s photographs of Antarctica emphasise the entropic, transient nature of the landscape. Works from the exhibition, such as Transformer and Sleeping Deliverance exist at the boundary between Romanticism and the fraught realities of a rapidly changing environment. Bearing witness to the continent’s disorientating, undeveloped landscape, while also watching its erosion and continual atmospheric shifts was a dislocating experience for Sherry. The artist identifies a hopefulness in he coexistence of beauty and destruction. His photographs act as testament to the beauty of the natural environment and our position within it, as well as an urgent call for its protection.
