Elijah Gowin, 'Balloon', 2001.
'Balloon', a photograph taken by Elijah Gowin in 2001, depicts a strange quasi-spherical shape enigmatically covered and held down by a sheet in what could be a suburban garden; in the background, a woman shields her eyebrows from the sun as she looks up in hawkeyed contemplation, perhaps at something rising in the sky. What balloon? In its ambiguous, counterintuitive illustration of its title, Gowin's image stands like a riddle, one presenting the viewer with multiple mutually-linking answers, metaphorical concentric bubbles of meaning that fall in the viewer's attentive eye just as they rise away. Does what goes up always descend at the very same time?
A similar tension to the paradoxical, gravity-related double entendre inside 'Balloon' exists in the artist's latest exhibition, two chapters off a new series entitled 'Of falling and floating' that will be showing at Robert Mann Gallery in New York starting this coming week. The collection shows bodies suspended midair over leafy tree tops, mysteriously caught in an act that inspires anxiety and uncertainty. Yves Klein tapped into similar reactions with his dramatically self-portrait leaping into a netless tree-lined suburban street. Like Klein's Gowin's images have incredible life-like credibility, but a closer look reveals the laborious process the artist has used to make them. The photographs are constructed from many separate elements sourced in amateur photographs found on the internet which are then digitally collaged together in layers, flattened into a small paper negative, and lastly scanned from this format.
The combination of old and new technologies results in prints that have a slightly vintage tone, despite the clues that tip off the touch of digital image manipulation. The images appear timeless somehow, hazily inconclusive, as if extracted from that quintessentially recurring dream - the alluring duality of the state of falling, of in-betweenness, a fear and a wish all rolled into one, a disquieting imagined fascination that confronts the bystander with a sinking, whether active or passive, acceptance of Newton's undeniable principle.
Lupe Nunez-Fernandez
ELIJAH GOWIN, 'OF FALLING AND FLOATING'
17 May - 20 June 2007.
Robert Mann Gallery
210 Eleventh Avenue
Between 24th & 25th Streets
New York NY 10001
T: +1 212 989 7600
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