Today from our partners at Art Practical, we bring you a review of the current group show at Gallery Wendi Norris in San Francisco. Author Danica Willard Sachs writes: “In a moment when the commonplace assumption is that photographs are digitally manipulated, the exhibition shines in its success at reminding viewers that wonder can still be found in the analog realm of the darkroom, or even in the camera itself.” This article was originally published on February 5, 2015.

Stephen Gill. Talking to Ants, 2009–12; pigment archival paper print, image 40 x 40 in., paper 44 x 44 in., edition of 5 plus 2 AP. Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco.

The Return to Reason, on view at Gallery Wendi Norris, takes its title from Man Ray’s 1923 film, Le Retour à la Raison. In the three-minute film, Man Ray translates his signature photograms into moving images, making familiar objects like nails and pins anew by placing them directly onto sheets of film. These alternate with shots of a geometric mobile and its shadow, the spinning lights on a carousel, and a slowly revolving woman’s torso. Like Man Ray’s frenetic experiment, the five artists selected by curator Allie Haeusslein for The Return to Reason also manipulate photographic processes to create wondrous explorations of form.

The front gallery of the exhibition features the work of two of these artists, Chloe Sells and Lorenzo Vitturi. Sells creates one-of-a-kind topographic pastel-hued photographs of the Rocky Mountains by layering color and texture on negatives in the darkroom. Four of these are installed together in a pinwheel shape, a kaleidoscope of variations on the stony mountain faces. Across from these is a more visually striking work, Katoyissiksi (2014), which depicts a forested landscape and its reflection immediately below. Unframed and tacked onto the wall, Sells’s image fades into an ombre wash of cyan, magenta, and blue, the literal pigment elements of the chromogenic print.

Read the full article here.