Sally Mann at the Gagosian Gallery

Distinguished Southern Photographer Sally Mann (see image above, (c) Sally Mann and used courtesy of the Gagosian Gallery) is about to have a show of new work at the Gagosian Gallery in NYC, opening September 22nd and up through October 29th, 2016.

This show features images from Mann's portfolio Remembered Light,  images made in the studio of Virginia-based, distinguished American painter Cy Twombly. 

The Gagosian Gallery's press release for this show describes Mann's work thus:

"In her latest exhibition of photographs . . . [Mann] records in fleeting impressions the working habitat of the late Cy Twombly, her close friend and mentor . . . both natives of Virginia. 

"The landscape to which Twombly returned each year is also the memoryscape of Mann’s connection to him. 

"This was documented in her recent and celebrated memoir Hold Still, in which she recalls his elemental nature, his southern courtesy, his wry and gentle humor. 

 

Mann has been fascinated with the play of light in much of her recent work, including work in this show, as illustrated by the image above, also (c) Sally Mann and used courtesy of the Gagosian Gallery.

The Gallery says that Mann's relationship with Twombly "was documented in her recent and celebrated memoir Hold Still, in which she recalls his elemental nature, his southern courtesy, his wry and gentle humor. 

"Recalling her time with Twombly, Mann writes, “Our part of the South, remote, beautiful, and patinaed with the past, allows us such a remove, the distance of another time.

"Under Mann’s gaze, and the warm light of Virginia, the accumulations and ordinary objects in Twombly’s studio reveal themselves not only as evidence of a richly imaginative and cultivated life lived and marked by tactility . . .  “the leftovers, smears, and stains, and an absence turned into a presence.” 

Mann's work in Twombly's studio has been the subject of a feature story in the NY Times, go here.

Also note the image of Twombly from the NY Times, directly below. 

Hilarie Sheets, the author of the NY Times piece, makes connections between Mann's work as a elegy for Twombly and Mann's more recent grief at the death of Emmett, Mann's eldest child, who, having struggled with schizophrenia in adulthood, took his own life this past June, at the age of 36.

Sheets says of Mann that in her writing and in her photographs she stares "as squarely as she [can], contemplating the passage of time and the transience of life."

The relationship between life and art, and especially between grief and art, is complex, contradictory, defying simple description.  

The making of meaning in the visual arts is especially valuable, however, because it works through non-verbal media, suggesting that the act of creativity is the meaningful event, not the verbal explanation for it. 

Mann's capacity to turn the simplest traces of human creativity into compelling images that draw us back, over and over, is a powerful demonstration of this capacity.