Morgan Cohen: New Photographs

Terry Rose: Immaterial

February 3 – 25 at Gallery NAGA

In February, Gallery NAGA presents two artists who tease splendor out of the understated.  In his third exhibition at the gallery, the photographer Morgan Cohen continues to conjure with luminescent phenomena he finds in ordinary settings.  In his NAGA debut, painter Terry Rose achieves something like an aura of awe out of the fluid interaction of his media.

Morgan Cohen: New Photographs and Terry Rose: Immaterial both run from February 3 through 25.  A reception for the artists and the public will be held at the gallery on Friday, February 3 from 6 to 8 pm.  In addition, both artists speak about their work on Saturday, February 11, Cohen at 2 pm and Rose at 3 pm. 

Images of the work of both artists can be seen at www.gallerynaga.com.

Since his last NAGA show in late 2004, Morgan Cohen’s photographs have been exhibited at Goya Contemporary in Baltimore and the Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown, and the nature of his work has evolved.  Previously centered on forms abstracted from domestic life, the work has moved to a focus on transitory images generated by effects of light, a far less substantial subject.  At the same time, the scale of Cohen’s prints has jumped, from 22x22” to 28x28,” a bigger increase in fact (more than 60%) than the measurements seem to suggest. 

“This new body of work seems more raw and less controlled,” Cohen says.  “It’s less reliant on actual space and more on the union of space and light.  The images are more fleeting.  For me, it’s more like grabbing something that’s hardly tangible.  And the increased size emphasizes characteristics you wouldn’t necessarily see if you were there.”

Photographs such as Hall and Wall with Shadows present a complete range of tones and a complex assessment of pattern – wallpaper in crepuscular light, shadows cast by branches – within the simple confines of a monochromatic corner of a home.  Making the virtually empty ravishing, Cohen continues to derive a great deal from very little.

Terry Rose is a mature painter who relocated to Rhode Island four years ago after some fifteen years in the Los Angeles art world.  Recently, he’s begun making his paintings by introducing oils and micron pigments, through a variety of means, into wet varnish, and the hydraulic interaction of these elements generates his singular imagery.  His forms suggest the organic, the aquatic, and the cosmic, and yet, of course, they are in fact none of these.  The paintings, and the spacious realms they seem to depict, are the result of Rose’s materials mix.

Rose himself sees his process as a kind of transmutation.  “I looked up the definitions of ‘sublime,’” he says “ and one of them is ‘to convert something inferior to something of higher worth.’  My method is to take different materials and bring them together to make a higher state.  Some of my most successful pieces, what you see is not what you get,” he continues.  “Something else comes through.”

“I’ve noticed this paradox.  My mentor in Los Angeles, Charles Garabedian, said, ‘Keep going deeper.’  I keep adding layers, attempting to go deeper into what I’m about.  I think I’m turning the external world inward.”

A painting such as Imagine, delicate yet vast, simple but complexly varied, does seem capable of taking the measure of an interior world.