November 29, 2008 – January 3, 2009
Opening reception:
Saturday, November 29, 2008
6:00 to 8:00 pm
For seven years artist Michael Lundgren worked exclusively on a series of photographs entitled, Transfigurations. Began in 2000 while he was still a graduate student at Arizona State University, Lundgren worked in the harsh and beautiful deserts of the American West creating spare photographic landscapes that refer to the heart of these places, not by description, but by metaphor.
As inferred by the title of the body of work, the meaning of these images is not based on their literal content, but rather comes from an engagement with the transformative capacity of the medium of photography. Lundgren writes:
“Through sequence they speak of a search for the elusive, through layers of phenomena unfurled as a story of desert experience.” He continues: “These photographs are . . . a search to understand beauty and terror, which are bound to one utter certainty—change. In the desert nothing is static, even rocks move. Through intuition, I hope to photograph the impossible, to fix the fugitive on film.”
The exhibition coincides with the release of Lundgren’s monograph from Radius Books of the same title.
This is the artist’s first solo show in New York City. His work is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Houston Center for Photography; and the Brandts Museum, Museum of Photography, Odense, Denmark; among others.