Renate Aller: Mountain Interval
July 6 – August 4, 2018
Opening Reception and Book Signing, Friday, July 6, 5-7pm
Santa Fe, NM– Chiaroscuro is pleased to present a solo exhibition, Mountain Interval, of large-scale photography from Renate Aller. Presented in conjunction with her latest monograph from Radius Books Mountain Interval, the exhibition brings together ten color photographs that challenge your perception of landscape photography and immerse you in “the space between memory and expectation.”
The photographs have a powerful presence, depicting a monumental landscape which pulls you in to its intimate details. Aller traveled to six continents and elevations as high as 22,500 feet (adjacent to Mount Everest) to capture these images. The photographs express beauty and grandeur, timelessness and ultimately the abstraction of her subject. Aller isolates the mountain from its expected surroundings, using and presenting the familiar and the known in an intimate way, relating to parallel realities from different locations, opening up conversations between the different landscapes in which we live. She explains, “The interval, the space in between, is and is about the moments during which apparently nothing happens, but without which no change could happen. “The Space between Memory and Expectation” is another way to describe this state of stillness and transition.”
The book includes sixty one images from the Mountain Interval portfolio, and the exhibition distills it down to ten images, each with its own narrative. The photographs contain elements of silence, time, and anticipation, while teaching us about its space and ultimately abstraction of form. Aller explains, “Human’s relationship to scale fascinates me. When we walk through a forest, or in the mountains, or even in the city, it’s difficult to gauge distances and relative scale. With my camera, I can bring things from the far distance into a sharp focus that interferes, in some way, with how we understand where we are in the world.”
This is Renate Aller’s fourth solo exhibition at Chiaroscuro. Born in Germany, Renate Aller lives and works in New York. Mountain Interval is her fourth monograph published with Radius Books, following Ocean|Desert, dicotyledon, and the long-term project Oceanscapes. Her works are in the collections of corporate institutions, private collections, and museums including Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven CT; George Eastman House, Rochester, NY; New Britain Museum of American Art, CT; Hamburger Kunstahalle, Germany; Chazen Museum of Art, Madison WI; and Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY.