Untitled # 3 (Blue Dreams series), 2001
color c-print mounted on aluminum with non glare Plexiglass
40 x 90 inches (3 panels: 40 x 30 each), Ed. 5
Louis Stern Fine Arts is pleased to announce
BENT: NEW WORK BY ELINOR MILCHAN
OPENING on January 11th
with an ARTIST RECEPTION from 6-9 PM
and continuing through February 22, 2003
“ I use the camera as I would use a brush to explore the infinite layers of the human condition. But there is no canvas, if not a negative, no pigment, if not light. The characters I create emerge from unidentified spaces imbued with intimate feelings, where darkness intertwines with waves colors.”
-Elinor Milchan, 2003
“Elinor Milchan's aesthetic reminds us that pathos is always essential to the beautiful, just as horror eternally informs the sublime. And this has always been critical to all memorable photographs.”
Robert A. Sobieszek, Curator of Photography, LACMA, December 2002
New York-based photographer, Elinor Milchan is exhibiting a series of abstract color photographs based on the heightened states of sorrow and disorientation following the collapse of the World Trade Center. Working with the recollections of those at the site at the time of the collapse, Milchan creates images of turbulent beauty, evoking the powerful feelings of the survivors who suddenly found themselves swallowed by their physical and emotional landscape.
Using intense color and light in the shooting process, and large-format c-prints that dominate the viewer, Milchan transforms the familiar into the unfamiliar, rewarding the viewer with luscious painterly beauty, while delivering haunting figures that emerge from the abstract field as if buffeted by the fires of the explosion. Also on exhibit are Milchan’s extremely large-format monochrome portraits. Ethereal feminine figures waft through a vibrant field of color, with all the mystery and delicacy of a reflection dancing in a pool of light.
This marks Elinor Milchan’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.