Jed Devine's new solo exhibition features images focused on the interior spaces of the artist’s daily life and experience, and represents a significant new development in the career of this important photographer. For the past forty years, he has been celebrated for his platinum palladium prints, distinguished by their delicate small-scale black and white still lifes, landscapes, and portraiture. (A selection of which will be on view in the Project Space.)
These new photographs at the Benrubi Gallery finds Devine shifting his approach dramatically as his palette expands to include digital color photography. In his work over the past year, Devine has created layered imagery that provides a diary of domestic activities as well as a library of the images that have defined his sensibility.
Those images are both commercial and classical as the viewer encounters icons of art history juxtaposed with contemporary painting, commercial illustration, photojournalism, and three-dimensional household items. Devine’s everyday objects and reproductions of the flat art he finds on his breakfast table impart a compelling two-dimensional sculptural quality. We find ourselves asking where the photograph as object now resides in the age of post-appropriation and image saturation.
Devine’s new images are thus eclectic collages veering gently into the realm of abstraction. Humorous, surprising, and challenging, this work has a decisive place in the evolution of the artist’s career, contextualizing the earlier images as pieces in what we can now understand to be a culminating point in the artist’s lifelong imagemaking. ]The show runs through March 8th.
Photos by Lena Vasillilou
