SHARON HARPER: FLUG (FLIGHT)
Dates: December 6, 2001 – January 26, 2002
Opening Reception: Thursday December 6, 5–7 pm

Marcel Sitcoske Gallery is proud to present the first West Coast exhibition of work by New York based photographer Sharon Harper. This show coincides with The Whitney Museum of American Art's exhibition First Exposure: Sharon Harper - Photographs from the Floating World. This is also Harper's first one-person gallery exhibition.

Taken from the window of a high-speed train while traveling through Germany, France, and Italy, and printed on matte paper, these black and white photographs have the moody and atmospheric quality of charcoal drawings. The deep blacks and luscious grays of these works give them a richness seldom seen in this medium. Instead of capturing an objective, static image of the landscape, Harper presents a fluid, often blurred scene, as hills drift into sky, trees into roads, reminiscent of our experience of traveling through the landscape. Some images border on abstraction while others mix recognizable elements with hazy forms. In Germany.i, clouds peek out from behind a dark, blurred form, which reveals itself to be trees, while a small group of houses is visible through an opening. The subject here is not just the houses or even the entire landscape, but moreover the experience of glimpsing this scene.

In this way, Harper redefines the traditional role of photography as simply a way to record the way things look. She expands this role to include our experience of what is being photographed. To this end, these works function as external and internal landscapes at the same time. For Harper, the journey or "Flight" is both a way to see and experience the landscape as well as an opportunity to peer into interior spaces. These works show a struggle and search for resolution as images form out of chaos, clarity follows confusion. As Stuart Horodner, the curator of Harper's exhibition at the Goethe-Institut, writes in his essay on her work: "Her landscapes are dense abstractions and porous representations; difficult to grasp and likely to change, disperse or retreat into the unique combination of darkness and light from which they came." It is this flux and elusiveness which makes Sharon Harper's photographs so complex and rewarding to behold.