HALSEY MCKAY GALLERY

Late one night I was driving home from my studio in a snowstorm. Visibility was minimal and the only thing I could see, besides the television-like static of snow falling on the road ahead of me was the moon. I turned on the radio to get the weather forecast and amid the crackling transmission the only audible words that came through clearly, for a brief moment were, “…moving across the interior”, before the broadcast turned back into white noise.

Around the same time of year, I had been given a couple boxes of my two great uncles’ photographs and 16mm films. It was a revelation. In the boxes were various family photographs but one film reel stood out, titled: “Lake, 1950”. The silent recording is a series of photographic memorials from certain places and times of which nothing else remains. It was filled with these small vignettes that lasted only a few moments. …a bird in flight over the pond, captured, it seemed from a canoe while in motion. The family dog smiling into the camera. The wind moving through cottonwoods in the dying Autumn light. A modest meal set on top of a red and black checkered cloth in the grass near the water. A full moon rising behind the clouds at twilight.

Photography is a way to physically manifest time through the materiality of light. Moving Across The Interior is a reflection on photography and its intrinsic and omnivorous abilities to describe, identify, distort, reveal and obscure what we think we know about time, identity, memory and our own lives. We’re drifting from one place to another. These places, people and objects being reshaped over time by their surroundings, like a slow moving weather pattern… This is an optical research into the plural nature of reality.

Bryan Graf

Portland, Maine, July, 2015

Bryan Graf (b. 1982) lives and works in Portland, Maine. He received an M.F.A from Yale University in 2008 and a B.F.A. from the Art Institute of Boston in 2005. His first solo museum show, Moving Across the Interior, was on view at the ICA@MECA in Portland, Maine in April 2014. Grafʼs work has recently featured in Second Nature: Abstract Photography Then and Now at the Decordova Sculpture Park and Museum, and The Polaroid Years: Instant Photography and Experimentation at the Loeb Art Center at Vassar College. Grafʼs work has appeared in numerous publications, including Blind Spot and The New York Times. He is the subject of three monographs: Wildlife Analysis (Conveyor, 2013), Moving Across the Interior (ICA@MECA, 2014), and Prismatic Tracks (Conveyor, 2014). Moving Across the Interior is the the artist’s first solo exhibition with Halsey McKay. Graf is also represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York, NY.