September 1, 2021 (San Francisco, CA) — Eleanor Harwood Gallery is thrilled to present Havasu Falls, new work from Bay Area photographer Terri Loewenthal. Havasu Falls is the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery and features eight large scale photographs of Havasu Falls created in the artist’s signature style— strikingly saturated kaleidoscopic images created on-location through optics she designed herself, which enable her to express the experience of being in wild places. Havasu Falls opens on September 11th and runs through October 30th with an opening event on September 11th from 5pm until 7pm. The artist will be present.
In late February of 2020, days before the Coronavirus pandemic hit the U.S., Terri Loewenthal, an emerging female voice in landscape photography, made the journey to Havasu Falls just downriver from the Grand Canyon within the Havasupai Nation. An astute observer of the West, Loewenthal traveled to remote native land to acknowledge the huge contrast between white America’s extractive mentality and the still-extant wildness with which the Havasupai people coexist. Shortly after, the Havasupai tribe closed the campground to visitors in order to keep a new outside virus at bay.
Disease, blood, beauty, conquest—the tale of the Great American West is storied and complicated and so is the history of its landscape photography. Alongside the dogged postcolonialist push of westward expansionism propelled by manifest destiny, early photographs of the American West helped to mythologize the land and incentivize its cultivation. Towering snow capped mountains and giant trees beckoned to adventurous settlers who were seeking to carve out a piece of the land for themselves.
In contrast to a straightforward representational photography, Terri Loewenthal has become recognized for an alternative feminist imaging of the American West. Her works are single exposures, composited in her camera while on site – collaged vantage points of the 360˚ landscape surrounding a singular location, each layer altered with swaths of saturated color. Her approach is painterly and rigorously sensate in her depictions of the landscape. The new works in Havasu Falls are lush and rich, invoking the misty air that bounces off the walls of the canyon, full of positive ions and texture. Her color choices feel like litmus tests, PH strips measuring the make-up of the place around her. Historically, landscape photography showed us pristine faraway places ripe for the taking. Loewenthal moves us towards an emotional experience – that we neither conquer nor confine nature, but instead nurture a complex and deep relationship with it.
Traditional imagery of Havasu Falls is saturated forest greens, icy blues and earthy terracotta reds—the green blue of the water slices through and sprays over the Arizona red rock, beckoning adventurous travelers to the banks of its lush oasis. Loewenthal’s Havasu Falls provides a marked alternative to the typical photographic treatment of the land. The famed aqua water becomes a secondary character to the imposing red rocks. Vantage points are mostly looking upwards, providing the sense of being deep within the walls of a canyon with only glimpses of sky. Tree branches and rock texture details dominate the foreground. Catching a sliver of waterfall in this series becomes an event, as exciting as coming upon water in the middle of a desert, a metaphor for how precious and finite Colorado River water has become. For Loewenthal, picturing wild spaces is a form of care and hopefully, conservation. She states:
To care for land starts by showing up. You have to go there to be there, to look actively, so as maybe to see. A picture brings into consciousness a particular set of details. The compositions I am able to create with my custom optics utilize elements beyond what a traditional photograph can frame. It’s my attempt to indicate the spirit of a place.
About the Artist
Terri Loewenthal is an Oakland-based artist whose work challenges and revives the predominantly male canon of landscape photography by using a female voice to liberate the genre from the strictly representational. Her works are single-exposure, in-camera compositions that utilize special optics developed by Loewenthal to compress vast spaces into complex, evocative environments. These photographs present landscape not as it may appear visually, but how it could be experienced emotively and through the imagination.
She has exhibited at diverse venues including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco, CA), Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley, CA), San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art (San Jose, CA) and Booth Western Art Museum (Cartersville, GA). Her work is included in many collections, public and private, including the City of San Francisco, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Fidelity Investments, Facebook and Instagram. She is also founder of The Chetwood, a residency program that provides housing for artists visiting the Bay Area, allowing them to create lasting community with supportive peer networks outside of typical art-making structures. Loewenthal is a frequent collaborator with many Bay Area arts organizations including Creative Growth (Oakland, CA). Terri has a Bachelor of Arts from Rice University in Houston, Texas and is originally from Washington, D.C. and South Florida.
About Eleanor Harwood Gallery
Eleanor Harwood Gallery opened September 2006 in the Mission District and is now located in San Francisco’s premier gallery complex, the Minnesota Street Project. The gallery specializes in work with complex craft and concept, focused on painting, drawing, sculpture, textiles and photography by emerging to mid-career artists. The roster includes artists that are represented in major American and European collections. The gallery actively promotes and encourages career growth for represented artists.
Location
1275 Minnesota Street, Suite 206, San Francisco, CA 94107
Hours
Wednesday 10:00am-2:00pm, Thursday-Saturday 11am-5:00pm
Contact
(p) 415.867.7770
(e) eleanor@eleanorharwood.com
Check gallery website for hours and additional info
