Halsey McKay is thrilled to present Telepathic Jungle, a solo exhibition of new works by Bryan Graf on view through April 30 at HMGP, 60 Greenpoint Avenue, Brooklyn. Telepathic Jungle continues Graf’s exploration into photographic materiality, techniques, and the shifting tenses of reality. He is interested in how the accumulation of time allows images to become part of the landscape of our mind and memory. His practice stretches the boundary between control and chance, as he deliberately subverts traditional photographic representation in the creation of revelatory images that speak to a more spontaneous and instinctive experience of the world.
By using repetitive subjects with various rivers of color and form washing over them, there is a sense that nothing is static. Graf’s photographs both erase and combine past and present through his multi-faceted approach. The works in Telepathic Jungle are guided by images that are part of the artists corporeal understanding of reality in the form of response, intuition, dreams and instinctual recordings of things that seem to come from another dimension, yet are omnipresent in reality.
As a photographer creating pictures that are facsimiles, Graf is not concerned with portraying idealized forms or glamorized notions. Rather, he employs a deliberate hesitancy to capture clearly, and thereby upends the notion of the photograph’s “registered image”. In their inherent multiplicity, the works demonstrate a parallax view, changing positions from one image to the next. In so doing, Graf creates a sensation of remembering in the viewer, in lieu of a transmission of direct experience through photographic reality.
Bryan Graf (b.1982) received an MFA from Yale University in 2008 and a BFA from the Art Institute of Boston in 2005. His work has been exhibited at the George Eastman House Museum, Rochester, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, Maine; and DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, Massachusetts. Graf was a 2016 recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. His work has been featured and reviewed in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harpers, Blind Spot, and Details among others. He has published four books: Wildlife Analysis (Conveyor, 2013); Moving Across the Interior (ICA@MECA, 2014); Prismatic Tracks (Conveyor, 2014); and Debris of The Days (Conveyor 2017). His photographs and books are held in the public collections of The Museum of Modern Art Library, The Portland Museum of Art, Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, The Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Tokyo Institute of Photography.
