The upcoming spring season in the art world suggests a collective turning inward—a fascination with the mechanics of sight and the architecture of memory. From the sun-drenched coasts of California to the geometric grids of New York, galleries are presenting solo exhibitions that do more than display images; they interrogate the medium itself.
Whether through the dying alchemy of Cibachrome printing, the digital weaving of imaginary gardens, or the slow exposure of film to starlight, these nine exhibitions invite us to slow down. They ask us to look past the surface of the image and into the process of its making, revealing a world where the ordinary is rendered luminous and the silent is given a voice.
The Alchemy of Color and Light
In an era of instant digital capture, there is a profound resonance in works that require physical, chemical, and temporal patience. The first movement of our curatorial selection focuses on artists who manipulate light not just as a subject, but as a tangible material.
Christopher Burkett: The Last Luminist
Photography West | Carmel, California Through January 31, 2025
To stand before a Christopher Burkett print is to witness a form of photographic preservation that is rapidly becoming history. His exhibition, Reception 2024, is a testament to the Cibachrome (or Ilfochrome) process—a direct-positive method renowned for its archival stability and unparalleled color saturation.
Burkett does not merely take photographs; he waits for the “internal light” of the landscape to align with the film. The result is a vibrancy that feels almost three-dimensional, a “world behind the world.” Because the materials required for Cibachrome are no longer manufactured, these works are finite treasures, glowing with a chemical brilliance that digital printing has yet to fully replicate.
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Harold Ross: Sculpting in the Dark
Susan Spiritus Gallery | Irvine, California Ongoing
While Burkett captures the sun, Harold Ross works in the absence of it. For over twenty-five years, Ross has perfected the technique of light painting, a method that requires the artist to work in near-total darkness, using a handheld light source to “paint” the subject during a long exposure.
The result is closer to a Caravaggio painting than a traditional photograph. By selectively illuminating texture and curve, Ross separates the subject from its context, allowing everyday objects to float in a void of hyper-reality. This exhibition reveals the transformative power of controlled illumination, turning the mundane into the majestic through the simple, deliberate application of photons.
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Michael Kenna: The Architecture of Silence
The Hulett Collection | Tulsa, Oklahoma Through February 15, 2025
If Ross sculpts with light, Michael Kenna sculpts with time. His monochromatic landscapes are famous not for what they show, but for what they suggest. Using exposures that can last for hours—often at night—Kenna captures a world the human eye cannot register: the movement of stars, the smoothing of rough seas into glass, and the ghostly passage of clouds.
Curated by Michael Hulett, this exhibition emphasizes the haunting minimalism of Kenna’s vision. In a noisy world, these small-scale, gelatin silver prints offer a rare commodity: absolute silence. They remind us that the landscape is not static, but a fluid entity constantly rewriting itself in the dark.
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The Garden of Forking Paths
Moving from the physics of light to the metaphysics of nature, this section explores how artists are reimagining the botanical world. Here, the garden is not just a place of growth, but a stage for mythology, digital intervention, and meditation.
Mary Mattingly: Evolving Ecosystems
Robert Mann Gallery | New York, New York Through February 7, 2025
Mary Mattingly’s Night Gardens challenges the boundary between the grown and the glitch. Inspired by the nocturnal environments of Socrates Sculpture Park, Mattingly fuses physical collage with digital manipulation. Her gardens are not passive; they are resilient, combative ecosystems where lotuses and thistles intertwine as symbols of survival.
The exhibition stands out for its “techno-pastoral” aesthetic. By blending biological life with ancient myth and digital artifice, Mattingly creates a visual metaphor for the Anthropocene—beautiful, fragile, and undeniably altered by human hands. It is a haunting look at how we remember nature in an age of environmental precarity.
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Lynda Lowe: The Vessel and the Void
Gail Severn Gallery | Ketchum, Idaho Through February 1, 2025
In By The Light in Darkness, Lynda Lowe approaches the natural world through the lens of alchemy. Her mixed-media works often feature the motif of the vessel—specifically the moon jar—acting as a container for mystery and potential.
Lowe reframes darkness not as an end, but as a fertile soil for germination. Her juxtaposition of scientific observation (botanical forms, birds) with abstract, atmospheric washes suggests a “sentient presence” in nature. The work invites the viewer to consider the invisible energies that bind the physical world together, finding a strange, quiet hope in the shadows.
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Kelly Ording: The Rhythm of the Sun
Gilman Contemporary | Ketchum, Idaho Through January 23, 2025
While Lowe looks to the earth, Kelly Ording looks to the sky. Her exhibition Sungazing translates the dangerous, meditative act of staring at the sun into a safe, visual language. Through the use of rhythmic lines, repetitive geometry, and a vibrant, heated palette, Ording captures the afterimages that dance behind closed eyelids.
These paintings are exercises in frequency and vibration. They strip away the chaos of the landscape to focus purely on the sensation of warmth and the passage of time, offering a visual equivalent to a deep, rhythmic breath.
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Spaces of Intimacy and Memory
The final collection of exhibitions turns the gaze toward human spaces—both the domestic interiors we inhabit and the emotional landscapes we carry within us.
Bruce Cohen: The Geometry of Quiet
Berggruen Gallery | San Francisco, California Through February 27, 2025
Bruce Cohen’s realist paintings operate on a delicate tension: they are clearly inhabited spaces, yet the inhabitants are missing. His interiors, populated by carefully placed fruit, vases, and books, draw heavily from the Dutch still-life tradition and the surrealist handling of light.
The power of Cohen’s work lies in this palpable absence. The geometric precision of a window frame or a shadow implies a human observer who has just stepped out of the room. It is a study of domestic sanctity, elevating the everyday arrangement of objects into a silent poetry of existence.
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Willy Ronis: The Humanist Lens
Peter Fetterman Gallery | Santa Monica, California Through March 1, 2025
To view the work of Willy Ronis is to return to the roots of 20th-century Humanist photography. A peer of Cartier-Bresson, Ronis sought not just the “decisive moment,” but the “tender moment.” His images of Parisian life are suffused with a genuine affection for his subjects, finding beauty in the cobblestones and cafes of a bygone era.
This retrospective at Peter Fetterman Gallery is essential for understanding the lineage of street photography. It serves as a warm, monochromatic counterpoint to the conceptualism of contemporary art, reminding us that the most profound subject matter remains the simple, unposed connection between people.
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John Chiara and Angela West: The Deconstructed Landscape
Jackson Fine Art | Atlanta, Georgia Through January 18, 2025
In In Conversation, two distinct voices merge to discuss the nature of place. John Chiara is known for his massive, hand-built camera obscuras, which he transports on flatbed trailers to capture landscapes directly onto photographic paper. The resulting images are reversed, high-contrast, and physically jagged—literally cut from the roll.
Paired with Angela West’s layered mixed-media works, the exhibition moves beyond documentation. It explores the landscape as a repository of memory. Chiara’s chemical burns and West’s tactile surfaces suggest that a place is defined not just by its geography, but by the emotional imprint we leave upon it.
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