Gardens of Abstraction

Gardens of Abstraction, on view at SLATE contemporary from May 4 through June 24, presents three contemporary photographers who are grappling with the history of painting and the question of how to be an artist in this photographic age. All three are working in large formats, using digital printing technology, and referencing, to various degrees, narratives of old master painting. Carol Inez Charney has taken paintings by Leonardo Da Vinci, Monet, Van Gogh, Chagall, and Matisse, as her subject, appropriating them and then re-presenting them through her own personal lens of water moving on glass. Christy Lee Rogers creates underwater scenes using multiple figures, elaborate costumes, and dramatic lighting that reference 16th and 17th century Mannerist and Baroque paintings. Diane Rosenblum, on the other hand, has turned to landscape paintings by the Hudson River School, digitizing them, sampling colors, and pulling them out into pixel-like blocks to emphasize the distance between these artists’ 19th century romantic vision of nature, and our contemporary tendency to filter experience (of both nature and culture), through photographic and digital media.