Lewis deSoto: ARBOR/ARDOR
February 3–March 30, 2017
Lewis deSoto, Seven Minutes on Trinity Road, Sonoma, CA., 09.21.2007, 2007-2016, color photograph comprised of 76 individual frames, Courtesy of the Artist and Chandra Cerrito Contemporary, Oakland
Chandra Cerrito Contemporary is pleased to announce two concurrent solo exhibitions February 3 through March 30, 2017, Sarah Bird’s the fullest measure of you, is you (front gallery) and Lewis deSoto’s ARBOR/ARDOR (upper gallery). The shows reveal Bird and deSoto's overlapping areas of enquiry. Now based in New York, Bird studied with deSoto among others while attending graduate school at California College of the Arts in the early 1990s.
These two exhibitions present intimate visions of the landscape, and of trees in particular. Bird creates life-size black and white photographic portraits of giant California redwoods, equating their significance – or as she says, “their magnificent equal footing, and their essential role in our web of being” – to that of human subjects. In a range of photographic and video works spanning three decades, deSoto explores the relationship between the human body and nature, through acts of performance and site-specific standing meditation. Some of deSoto’s images consider human impacts on the environment, or the essential connection between man and nature, while others allude to the sustenance and humility that deep observation of the landscape provides. Nature, as envisioned by Bird and deSoto, is awesome, both timeless and vulnerable, something we revere, commune with, and desperately need to protect.
