New Moon
2024
Morán Morán is pleased to announce New Moon, an exhibition showcasing ten new paintings and three
large-scale monochromatic film photographs by American artist David Benjamin Sherry at the gallery's
México City location. This will be the artist's first solo show in México City and marks his sixth with Morán
Morán since his first project with the gallery in 2009.
David Benjamin Sherry's artistic journey, spanning two decades of traversing the American West, living in his car, and exploring geological extremes like Death Valley and Glacier National Parks –– all to capture the immense meeting of elements that have opened eyes to the continent's immaculate disappearing natural environments, has culminated in his latest works. Since relocating to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 2021, he has honed his technical skills and channeled his profound understanding of color and form into creating captivating oil paintings on canvas.
These paintings, like his acclaimed photography, offer a unique perspective on landscapes, using vividly colored monochromes to depict natural environments devoid of human presence. This exhibition is a testament to his ongoing exploration of non-lens-based graphic abstractions, manifested in his collection of photograms (2012-2017), published in Pink Genesis.
This shift in Sherry's material approach also presents a critical recalibration of perspective. Rather than depicting what is directly in front of him, as in his expansive color photographs, Sherry's latest work presents the
David Benjamin Sherry's artistic journey, spanning two decades of traversing the American West, living in his car, and exploring geological extremes like Death Valley and Glacier National Parks –– all to capture the immense meeting of elements that have opened eyes to the continent's immaculate disappearing natural environments, has culminated in his latest works. Since relocating to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 2021, he has honed his technical skills and channeled his profound understanding of color and form into creating captivating oil paintings on canvas.
These paintings, like his acclaimed photography, offer a unique perspective on landscapes, using vividly colored monochromes to depict natural environments devoid of human presence. This exhibition is a testament to his ongoing exploration of non-lens-based graphic abstractions, manifested in his collection of photograms (2012-2017), published in Pink Genesis.
This shift in Sherry's material approach also presents a critical recalibration of perspective. Rather than depicting what is directly in front of him, as in his expansive color photographs, Sherry's latest work presents the
natural world as something not only to bear witness to but to be felt: a revelatory event
happening to their creator. Pairing these otherworldly, painted mystical abstractions alongside a series of
monochromatic, large-scale 8x10 film photographs of billowing cumulus clouds, each bathed in his
signature saturated tones of magenta, cyan, and yellow, Sherry unites that which is atmospheric,
ethereal, and symbolic, ultimately developing a visual language that departs from realism while
maintaining a sense of the sublime.
New Moon, the title of his exhibition, references an astrological event when the moon is between the Earth and the sun in its orbit, causing the moon's dark side to appear invisible in the sky. This phase marks the beginning of the moon's cycle, and in this way, Sherry's work points to the renewal of the self, a rebirth of light after a period of darkness. It is simultaneously about that which is visible to the naked eye and a realm of possibilities that lie in what we cannot see, the frontier between the known and the unknown.
These new paintings, says Sherry, "are indebted to the color of the photographs and of my time spent looking into the sky and looking into myself, longing for a connection to the universe, looking for answers." Like the paintings featured in his 2022 exhibition, poignantly titled Gloria, these abstract and minimal landscapes reflect the artist's desire to communicate an internal sense of landscape, the topography of the mind––a delirium of intangible territory even more challenging to map than any National Park.
– Lola Kramer
New Moon, the title of his exhibition, references an astrological event when the moon is between the Earth and the sun in its orbit, causing the moon's dark side to appear invisible in the sky. This phase marks the beginning of the moon's cycle, and in this way, Sherry's work points to the renewal of the self, a rebirth of light after a period of darkness. It is simultaneously about that which is visible to the naked eye and a realm of possibilities that lie in what we cannot see, the frontier between the known and the unknown.
These new paintings, says Sherry, "are indebted to the color of the photographs and of my time spent looking into the sky and looking into myself, longing for a connection to the universe, looking for answers." Like the paintings featured in his 2022 exhibition, poignantly titled Gloria, these abstract and minimal landscapes reflect the artist's desire to communicate an internal sense of landscape, the topography of the mind––a delirium of intangible territory even more challenging to map than any National Park.
– Lola Kramer
WORKS
INSTALLATION
Mother
2023
Huxley-Parlour gallery is delighted to announce the first UK exhibition by American artist, David Benjamin Sherry. Sherry’s practice examines the mythologies and iconography of the American Midwest, while opening them up as sites for queer potential.
Sherry’s photographic practice bears witness to the changing landscapes of the Western United States. Reinventing the well-trodden views of the country’s national parks, Sherry’s landscapes are each rendered in a single, vivid colour. In doing so, Sherry seeks to challenge the West’s colonialist trope of the individualist, with all its corollary connotations of straightness, whiteness and maleness, to present a more inclusive discourse around the region and its preservation.
Sherry’s photographic practice bears witness to the changing landscapes of the Western United States. Reinventing the well-trodden views of the country’s national parks, Sherry’s landscapes are each rendered in a single, vivid colour. In doing so, Sherry seeks to challenge the West’s colonialist trope of the individualist, with all its corollary connotations of straightness, whiteness and maleness, to present a more inclusive discourse around the region and its preservation.
The landscapes included in Mother are made where the artist resides, in the American West - specifically, California, Utah, and New Mexico. Sites include Yosemite Valley and Joshua Tree and range from the highest mountains of California to the lowest desert on Earth. Sherry’s work traces its roots to his own personal climate grief, as he experiences the loss of entire ecosystems firsthand. He states that he uses photography ‘as a means to see, understand and commune with our sacred landscape in new, provocative ways.’
This exhibition reveals how, through a nuanced interplay of colour, form and scale, Sherry’s work promotes an urgent liberation of ecological and queer potentialities. At a time when reconnection with landscapes and ecosystems may be essential for our continued existence, this exhibition displays how Sherry offers new, empathetic and sublime ways of viewing the natural world.
This exhibition reveals how, through a nuanced interplay of colour, form and scale, Sherry’s work promotes an urgent liberation of ecological and queer potentialities. At a time when reconnection with landscapes and ecosystems may be essential for our continued existence, this exhibition displays how Sherry offers new, empathetic and sublime ways of viewing the natural world.
PHOTOGRAPHS
INSTALLATION
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Blue Monsson
2023
Smoke The Moon is pleased to present Blue Monsoon, a solo presentation of paintings and photography by David Benjamin Sherry. The exhibition is the artist's first solo show in Santa Fe, where he works and lives. On view from July 14th to August 20th, the show will debut twelve paintings and six contact prints that define the acclaimed artist’s evolving reverence of landscape, light and spirit.
As Sherry dives deeper into his subject matter, his resulting work has trended toward the manual. Pink Genesis (2017) presented a collection of photograms in characteristic monochrome. The suite consists of vibrant color field compositions created through a C-Print stencil and overlay method done in the darkroom. His technique is analog photography in its most alchemical sense, and the subsequent images are radiant and emotive. This is perhaps the most direct precursor to his current iteration of image-making: painting.
As Sherry dives deeper into his subject matter, his resulting work has trended toward the manual. Pink Genesis (2017) presented a collection of photograms in characteristic monochrome. The suite consists of vibrant color field compositions created through a C-Print stencil and overlay method done in the darkroom. His technique is analog photography in its most alchemical sense, and the subsequent images are radiant and emotive. This is perhaps the most direct precursor to his current iteration of image-making: painting.
Sherry’s painting process is a ritual. He spends several days mixing pigments to find the perfect hue; builds color layer by layer, softening gradients and creating a completely smooth, rich surface. The process is tactile, performative and also meditative. Drawing inspiration from Transcendental Painting Group artists like Agnes Pelton, Florence Miller Pierce and Raymond Jonson, as well as New Mexico icon Georgia O’Keeffe, Sherry distills the desert landscape into shape and color, transcending the bounds of realism. Sherry looks to painting as a holistic means of capturing, even embodying, the most sublime aspects of existence.
Fusing op-art with landscape, the innate sensuality that has always underlied Sherry's photography merges with its surface in his paintings. Organic forms blissfully reverberate along a spectrum of a singular pigment: Orange, Pink, Yellow, Blue play out respectively like the crisp notes of a chromatic piano. There is a wondrous clarity and ease to Sherry's interpretations that will feel familiar to those who have gazed into the desert and felt at home.
Fusing op-art with landscape, the innate sensuality that has always underlied Sherry's photography merges with its surface in his paintings. Organic forms blissfully reverberate along a spectrum of a singular pigment: Orange, Pink, Yellow, Blue play out respectively like the crisp notes of a chromatic piano. There is a wondrous clarity and ease to Sherry's interpretations that will feel familiar to those who have gazed into the desert and felt at home.
PAINTINGS
INSTALLATION
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Gloria
2022
Morán Morán is pleased to announce David Benjamin Sherry’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery, titled Gloria, which features a new series of large-scale works on canvas. Although a departure, Sherry continues to be motivated by environmental concerns, queer identity, magic, and the landscape. His travels throughout the American West and the monochrome photographs and photograms he produced over the last fifteen years now provide an active archive of ocular and experiential memories, a trove that he mined to make these paintings. In addition to the title’s spiritual overtones, the show is an homage to his late mother, Gloria, whose artwork Sherry credits with inspiring aspects of this work.
Over the past two years, Sherry has found a different view of the natural world and of his practice. A move to New Mexico, with its high elevations and seemingly endless amount of open space, is known to be an energetically charged environment. Working from memory and intuition, now under the clarifying glare of the high desert light, Sherry translates his environment and experience into spirited paintings. The twelve minimal abstractions presented in this exhibition involve form, color, and some degree of mysticism to reveal an earthly and human interconnection.
Using a limited palette and organic shapes, he created a serial prism of monochromatically vibrant images. The color of each work represents one hue or wavelength of the spectrum, including black and white, and the subject matter of forms and patterns reverberate simplifications of mesas, plateaus, mountains, rock, plantlife, and even magnetic fields, dust motes, and phosphenes. In addition to considering the effect of subject matter and compositions,
Over the past two years, Sherry has found a different view of the natural world and of his practice. A move to New Mexico, with its high elevations and seemingly endless amount of open space, is known to be an energetically charged environment. Working from memory and intuition, now under the clarifying glare of the high desert light, Sherry translates his environment and experience into spirited paintings. The twelve minimal abstractions presented in this exhibition involve form, color, and some degree of mysticism to reveal an earthly and human interconnection.
Using a limited palette and organic shapes, he created a serial prism of monochromatically vibrant images. The color of each work represents one hue or wavelength of the spectrum, including black and white, and the subject matter of forms and patterns reverberate simplifications of mesas, plateaus, mountains, rock, plantlife, and even magnetic fields, dust motes, and phosphenes. In addition to considering the effect of subject matter and compositions,
the materiality and process behind the work is also significant. Each canvas is executed in a high pigment matte paint that results in a stone or sand-like surface, which texturally references the desert. The meticulous hand-work in applying the many coats of paint that are necessary to build the surface became its own form of meditation for Sherry. Perhaps the symbolism and expression of gravitational or electromagnetic waves comes out of Sherry acting as a conduit – speaking on behalf of the landscape and natural world. And in that sense, he paints as if possessed, receiving a glorious, divine dictation. Consequently, his new works are performative echoes of sacred places and relationships, relaying the magic and energy inherent to our planet and to the lived experience. Optimistic in tone and emotionally bright, the paintings take aesthetic inspiration from the Transcendental Painting Group, Color Field painters, and Op Art, while also channeling the spirit of the artists from these movements; and as reverence, he uses his own existence and energy to reveal what is beyond the visible.
“I drew from my experience of 15 years making landscape photography, as well as a strong desire to move past the photograph and its limitations. I wanted to simplify my practice and be in complete manual control of my medium and my work, without relying on anything other than my body and mind, and to lean more on intuition and the natural inclinations of the materials. With painting, I believe I can create a spiritual connection through repetition and ritual. Often I feel I am connecting, conjuring, and communicating with earthly spirits and people I have known. Maybe Gloria is communicating with me through these paintings.” David Benjamin Sherry
“I drew from my experience of 15 years making landscape photography, as well as a strong desire to move past the photograph and its limitations. I wanted to simplify my practice and be in complete manual control of my medium and my work, without relying on anything other than my body and mind, and to lean more on intuition and the natural inclinations of the materials. With painting, I believe I can create a spiritual connection through repetition and ritual. Often I feel I am connecting, conjuring, and communicating with earthly spirits and people I have known. Maybe Gloria is communicating with me through these paintings.” David Benjamin Sherry
PAINTINGS
INSTALLATION
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American
Monuments
2019
American Monuments is a photographic series examining our relationship to landscape, climate change, color, queer identity, and historical photography, using monochrome depictions of the American national monuments being targeted by the Trump administration for immediate development in the interest of oil, coal and uranium exploration.
I watched in horror as the Trump Administration lifted the protected status of designated national monuments in order to lease the land for coal and uranium mining and oil drilling. Starting in the spring of 2017, I set out to explore, commune with, and photograph these lesser-known, wild, and hard-to-reach places. Spending months alone in these threatened sanctuaries, I became increasingly motivated to protect them, in part by engaging the tradition of photographic preservation. Photographers’ efforts to use their images to advocate for the protection of lands began in the 19th century with the U.S. Geological Survey, and are inextricably bound up with the United States’ complicated mission of simultaneously wresting lands from Indigenous peoples and preserving that land for future generations of Americans.
Like many of my forebears, I use an 8x10 large-format film camera, which allows for an unrivaled level of detail. However, when printing, I’m not interested in depicting the way the subject appears in reality, but rather its potential for emotional resonance between viewer and subject. Color is a conduit for me to make those feelings visible.
Aside from referencing the monuments themselves, the title also refers to the many bodies of historical photographic work that proudly documented the “free and open” American West at a time before human-induced climate change was recognized as an existential threat to our species and all life on Earth. The project consists of large scale (70x90inch) c-prints made in the analog color darkroom that are projections of large format (8x10) color negatives and printed in monochromatic hues.
I watched in horror as the Trump Administration lifted the protected status of designated national monuments in order to lease the land for coal and uranium mining and oil drilling. Starting in the spring of 2017, I set out to explore, commune with, and photograph these lesser-known, wild, and hard-to-reach places. Spending months alone in these threatened sanctuaries, I became increasingly motivated to protect them, in part by engaging the tradition of photographic preservation. Photographers’ efforts to use their images to advocate for the protection of lands began in the 19th century with the U.S. Geological Survey, and are inextricably bound up with the United States’ complicated mission of simultaneously wresting lands from Indigenous peoples and preserving that land for future generations of Americans.
Like many of my forebears, I use an 8x10 large-format film camera, which allows for an unrivaled level of detail. However, when printing, I’m not interested in depicting the way the subject appears in reality, but rather its potential for emotional resonance between viewer and subject. Color is a conduit for me to make those feelings visible.
Aside from referencing the monuments themselves, the title also refers to the many bodies of historical photographic work that proudly documented the “free and open” American West at a time before human-induced climate change was recognized as an existential threat to our species and all life on Earth. The project consists of large scale (70x90inch) c-prints made in the analog color darkroom that are projections of large format (8x10) color negatives and printed in monochromatic hues.
As a queer person, I continually ask myself what it means to venture into the wilderness, doing a job that has traditionally had a macho, heterosexual identity attached to it. I am constantly made aware of my outsider perspective in the largely heteronormative spaces of rural America. Historically, going out into the wilderness has been a means of shedding of social constraints, but that freedom has been reserved for straight white men who wish to strengthen and solidify their credentials as “rugged individualists.” My presence in the wilderness is, in a sense, a performance of “queering” these places, which I’ve found liberating and empowering, and I seek to convey this spirit in my photographs.
Interconnectedness between queer identity and the Earth has infused this series, which I consider a call for liberation from the patriarchal power structure that has controlled and abused our public lands, as well as our queer bodies, for generations. I rely on my art practice to help me better understand our physical and spiritual connection with our planet. The saturated image demands a second look, which may in turn help the viewer to re-visualize these familiar, even iconic terrains, and make more apparent our natural and sacred connections to them. Color can also indicate the presence of something unsettling below the surface. The pictures themselves become records of places that may soon be destroyed, as well as a means of grappling with the loss of the last remaining wilderness in our country.
I believe my pictures may help others navigate this age of climate crisis by providing an empathetic and sublime view of the natural world, and reminding us that these wild places are essential to human existence. And while these photographs may grapple with grim political circumstances, they can paradoxically exude optimism, through a bold use of color, form, and scale to ultimately represent independence, resistance, and self-determination— American qualities that we supposedly hold dear, but which are currently as imperiled as the land itself.
Interconnectedness between queer identity and the Earth has infused this series, which I consider a call for liberation from the patriarchal power structure that has controlled and abused our public lands, as well as our queer bodies, for generations. I rely on my art practice to help me better understand our physical and spiritual connection with our planet. The saturated image demands a second look, which may in turn help the viewer to re-visualize these familiar, even iconic terrains, and make more apparent our natural and sacred connections to them. Color can also indicate the presence of something unsettling below the surface. The pictures themselves become records of places that may soon be destroyed, as well as a means of grappling with the loss of the last remaining wilderness in our country.
I believe my pictures may help others navigate this age of climate crisis by providing an empathetic and sublime view of the natural world, and reminding us that these wild places are essential to human existence. And while these photographs may grapple with grim political circumstances, they can paradoxically exude optimism, through a bold use of color, form, and scale to ultimately represent independence, resistance, and self-determination— American qualities that we supposedly hold dear, but which are currently as imperiled as the land itself.
PHOTOGRAPHS
INSTALLATION
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