Duane Michals Seasons Sequence|Perceptions of Nature Exhibition

All pictures courtesy of The New York Review of Books

These four chromogenic prints are respectively entitled The Wintergarden’s White (2006), In Spring All Seems Green (2007), Summer is a Carnival of Cotton Candy Pink (2007), and Autumn is the Pot of Gold at the End of August’s Rainbow (2007). I came across them at a retrospective of the American photographer called “Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals” at the Peabody Essex Museum (review coming soon) which ended on June 21. They were displayed in this order, winter to autumn, except horizontally. These photographs actually belong to the Carnegie Museum of Art although they are not currently on show.

These are not Duane Michals’s most famous works, but they are part of his most recent. He is mainly renowned for his sequences of black and white photographs, which constituted the bulk of the exhibition. I was attracted to them because they were in colors and were landscapes rather than portraits, but also because they had this peculiar fan shape that made them stand out from the rest of the exhibition. They all represent Michals’s garden in all four seasons from the same angle which is simple and straightforward.

I figured this set would be appropriate to introduce my new exhibition, Perceptions of Nature. This exhibition will explore the relationships between artists and their environment, how they interpret it, how they use it, and how it affects them. In the meantime, the Metal Colors exhibitions will still be running because the advantage of this being a blog is that I don’t have space limitations and therefore I can still post artwork relevant to all exhibitions.