August 1– August 9, 2008

Experimental Photography by Seze Devres & Julian Shereda-McKenna

http://www.seze.net/exhibitions/tricksoflight.html

Curated by Jason Patrick Voegele & Lauren Culbreth

Hosted by Charles Merritt, 240 Richardson St. Brooklyn, NYC

Produced by Republic Worldwide

Stepping outside the boundaries of any familiar context is a high-risk high reward state of affairs. For any artist exploring their craft in ways unique and unusual there is always the chance of backfire, failure and shaken confidence, but not for Seze Devres and Julian Shereda-McKenna. Although the particulars of their creative process are vastly different, there is a common love of the photographic medium and an intuitive understanding of their shared subject matter (light) that amplifies the seemingly effortless mastery of their individual techniques.

Seze Devres’ work begins and ends in the darkroom. There is no camera so there is no negative unless you consider the hand cut stencils and dark room props she uses to manipulate the light of the enlarger. Each image is uniquely frozen in a series of creative painterly exposures. The end results swing from graphic to expressionist and all shades and degrees in between. Like a mad scientist playing away in her laboratory Seze turns the seemingly simple photogram into complex and sophisticated compositions that speak to color and line, formal relationships and dimensional space in all of the same ways that traditional representational photography does without ever compromising and suggesting anything representational.

Julian Shereda-McKenna on the other hand is all about the camera. His creative laboratory is as much in his hands as it is in any darkroom. While for the most part his subjects are tangible real world beings or objects, they are manipulated through home made filters and liquid combinations that break up the light and effectively turn his camera lens into a prism. Like Seze’s photograms, there is a mad scientist element at play here. It seems at first that the resulting prints are as much a purposeful manipulation of the artist’s intention as they are chance or random segments of light in motion trapped at the fortunate right place and time. However what is really going on here is a trained harnessing of chaos and a deep understanding of the formal science behind these creative anatomical studies of light itself. If that sounds too analytical, too process oriented it can be definitively stated that the ends here justify the means. Ultimately the prints appear as if you are seeing the world through an eye full of tears after a good cry or an adventure into the microcosmic invisible building blocks of our sensual universe.