Curator Sally Reynolds on “Ocean | Desert: The Space between Memory and Expectation”
The ocean and the desert are seeming disparate pieces of our planet. One is wet and one is dry. We think of them as opposites. We consider them as very separate places. But when we find sea shells in the mountains, we begin to understand each carries the memory of the other.
There exists a shared relationship, a shared memory which suggests the uniqueness we applaud, the separateness we acknowledge, is actually illusion. The ocean and the desert are one for they share the memory of the other.
This exhibition is a purposeful collection of photographs of the ocean taken on Long Island’s southern shore and the desert taken at the White Sands National Monument in New Mexico and the Great San Dunes National Park in Colorado. The images reflect the continual engagement of the same landscape and record observations which revere that which is observed. Alain de Botton has written, “Artists act as guides to a truer, more judicious, more intelligent understanding of
the world.” Renate Aller guides us to revere our planet and embrace an origin where all is interwoven and connected, and the space between memory and expectation is the most precious. It is now.
About The Artist
Renate Aller lives and works in New York. Ocean and Desert is her third monograph published with Radius Books, following Dicotyledon and the long-term project Oceanscapes-One
View-Ten Years. Pieces from that series and other site specific art works are in the collections of corporate institutions, private collectors and museums, including the Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Yale University Art Gallery, the George Eastman House, Rochester, New Britain Museum of American Art, Hamburger Kunsthalle and the Chazen Museum of Art, Madison.
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