Robert Klein Gallery is pleased to present Flat Earth, a solo exhibition of vintage photographs by New York City-based artist Lois Conner, curated by Leandro Villaro of the Penumbra Foundation. Please join us on opening night for an exclusive in-person viewing, featuring an artist talk with MFA Curator Nancy Berliner.
Conner has been photographing in Asia, Europe and America since the 1980s. Her photographs are astounding in their composition and detail, and confirm the possibility of an image that is both specific and general in regards to time, place and history. Inspired by hand-scroll Chinese paintings and seduced by the exquisite tonal and quality reproduction of the platinum printing process, Conner’s meticulous contact-printing practice suggests simplicity. Yet it conceals the complex technical and formal decisions she makes with remarkable clarity of purpose.
Her exhibition Flat Earth, showcases a selection of twenty-three multi-panel landscapes and seventeen vintage platinum prints. The selected works have been purposely decontextualized from their original bodies of work to offer a reading of the universal landscape. Through their physicality, visual rhetoric and silent narrative, the images make visible a profound understanding and respect for the genre, the medium (photography) and the documented places (with their particular cultures and histories). Conner’s photographs invite us to slow down and look carefully. And it is in this way that we might discover, in the space between the subject and object, her persistent gesture of searching.
Lois Conner
Flat Earth
until 21 May 2022
Robert Klein Gallery
38 Newbury Street
MA 02116 Boston
www.robertkleingallery.com
Aosta, Italy, 1978 © Lois Conner: Flat Earth
Xi Hu, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China, 1994 © Lois Conner: Flat Earth
Iguazu Falls, Argentina, 2005 © Lois Conner: Flat Earth
Canyon de Chelley, Arizona, 1996 © Lois Conner: Flat Earth
