EXHIBITION IMAGES | PRESS RELEASE | ARTIST PAGE
April 30 – May 24, 2021 | 79 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY
For all further information please contact info@halseymckay.com
Bryan Graf, Memorial, 2021, Archival pigment print, 20 x 24 inches
Halsey McKay is thrilled to present Wavelengths, Bryan Graf’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. On April 26th Bryan Graf will drive from Portland, Maine to East Hampton, NY and will hang one finished photograph in the gallery. From then until May 24th he will be at the Further On Artist In Residency and will add new work to the show daily. Wavelengths is an accumulative exhibition of Graf’s multiple approaches to photography that includes regimented daily seascapes made at high and low tide, nightly records of the moon cycle and other photo-based works that are more sensorial responses and perceptual translations of the landscape. The show functions like a job, with set hours for certain work and other times that allow for play, for clock watching, and experimentation. The resulting exhibition is a site-responsive, local, and homegrown reflection of his relationship to the area, the residency, and the gallery space.
We would like to thank Christina and Alan Macdonald for their support and generosity in hosting the artist at the Further On Artist in Residency. For more information visit: www.furtheronair.org.
a lucky past
can never be
killed.
is one of my favorite endings to a Charles Bukowski poem. Whatever happens going forward, whatever tipping point is crossed or exploded, whatever consequences might come, we will always inhabit that unchanging special place. Even if there is very little distance between now and then. With Bryan Graf’s work we can expect and experience unstable impulses, jumps in time, in boundary-crossing ecology. We the audience will float in a haze of aerated color. To walk directly into a field of rampant tangle of foliage and just dissolve. To let the circle close around you. A small penance paid for a lucky past.
To some extent it is difficult to encapsulate this coming show, as the work is very much “in progress.” Location being paramount here, he prefers not to bring a landscape with him. Graf has drawn the map to the work, but has left the outline open, the process of documenting a world of his own invention is freeform. The only way to determine an understanding of place and our belonging within it, is to look. To center yourself. There will be no wasted days. There will be no wasted memories. This work occupies space in an intoxicating epochal dream, the landscape offering immortality.
For the three weeks leading to closing night, Graf will roll up his pant legs stepping into the surf at Egypt Beach, will be hopping fences, walking the train tracks seeking otherwise evasive topologies from the inside. His mementos from the journey are often defined by an overwhelming rush of cloudy color and light, shafts of gleaming sunlight cutting through the nocturnal murk. Numb blushes of indigo, deep violet, buttery yellows transcending the limits of nature. A world defined by restless light and phantom quakes. Wires cross, the antennas are down, the wavelengths are higgledy-piggledy. His dreams are primeval, irrational, and undiscovered. In life and in these photographs, there are no straight lines. They are tied together by an uneven interval of pulsations, a tempo steadily sloshing from side to side. Graf wants us to walk with him, out into the low tide, far enough until we are swathed in our unconscious memories.
-Daniel Fuller
Atlanta, GA, March, 2021
Bryan Graf (b. 1982 in Perth Amboy, New Jersey) received an MFA from Yale University in 2008 and a BFA from the Art Institute of Boston in 2005. Graf has held solo shows nationally and internationally. His work has been exhibited at Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, Georgia; the George Eastman House Museum, Rochester, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, Maine; Transformer Station, Cleveland,Ohio, and DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, Massachusetts. Graf was a 2016 recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Grafʼs work has appeared in numerous publications, including Blind Spot, Details, Harpers, The New York Times, Fanoon Center for Printmedia Research, among others. He has published four books: Wildlife Analysis (Conveyor, 2013); Moving Across the Interior(ICA@MECA, 2014); Prismatic Tracks (Conveyor, 2014); and Debris of The Days (Conveyor 2017). His photographs and books are held in the public collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Portland Museum of Art, Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, The Victoria and Albert Museum, International Center of Photography, and the Tokyo Institute of Photography.