Richard Misrach, Robert Mann Gallery, NYC - Battleground Point

Richard Misrach : Battleground Point
Robert Mann Gallery, New York
March 7 - April 27, 2002

Acclaimed photographer Richard Misrach has been creating images of the American West for more than thirty years. Battleground Point presents his most recent work, a series of photographs documenting the rare presence of water in the Nevada desert.

Richard Misrach recalls driving across the Mojave Desert - a seemingly desolate and foreboding place - as a child with his family. Returning to the desert years later as an artist, he was awestruck by the severe beauty of the landscape. Richard Misrach began an expansive series of photographs entitled The Desert Cantos, simultaneously portraying the unique light, terrain, and inhabitants of the desert and addressing the controversial politics of this precious environment. In the spring of 1999, Richard Misrach was commissioned by The Nature Conservancy to photograph the Nevada desert. While visiting Carson Sink, he captured serene pools of water caused by flooding due to unusually high rainfall. The resulting images - meditative studies of land, water, and sky - comprise the upcoming exhibition 'Richard Misrach : Battleground Point'.

Every decade or so, heavy winter storms batter the desert of northern Nevada, filling the Carson and Humboldt rivers beyond capacity and flooding the Carson Sink. As high waters receded from the sink in the mid-eighties, hundreds of graves slowly emerged from the mud. Archaeologists were able to account for 416 individuals who lived in the area over the course of 3000 years, some of whom may be the genetic ancestors of today's Toidikadi (also known as the Stillwater Paiute). According to oral history, the Toidikadi once were at war with a tribe of red-headed giants about whom little else is known. Of their legendary battle, won by the Toidikadi, only the site and its name today remain : Battleground Point. In 1998, torrential rains again flooded the Carson Sink. These photographs were made in the spring of that year on a commission from the Nature Conservancy for the exhibition, In Response To Place.

The following appeared in the March 25 edition of 'The New Yorker' : "This is the twenty-fourth installment of Richard Misrach's "Desert Canto" series in nearly as many years and it's stunning. The current batch were taken in Nevada's Carson Sink, in an area that floods every decade or so, and its images of a watery desert landscape connect sky, sand, and water in a way that seems positively unearthly. In one sequence, the shifting light captured in print after print makes the same dune almost unrecognizable. Richard Misrach's huge color prints create a majestic vision of a world acting strangely."

Richard Misrach was born on July 11, 1949 in Los Angeles, California. He attended the University of California, Berkeley at the height of the antiwar movement in the 1960s. After graduation, he pursued independent work in photography, receiving his first National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for a series of images documenting street people on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. In 1979, Misrach began to photograph the American desert in earnest, choosing to print exclusively in color with a large format camera. Richard Misrach has completed numerous other series, including work in Greece, Hawaii, and Africa. He has received four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work is represented in more than fifty major international museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He continues to travel and photograph extensively in the American West and abroad.

ROBERT MANN GALLERY
210 Eleventh Avenue, New York, NY 10001
www.robertmann.com