Foto Relevance is pleased to announce Liminal Spaces, a solo show from award-winning contemporary photographer Abelardo Morell. The exhibition, arranged in collaboration with Edwynn Houk Gallery, spotlights Morell's critically acclaimed Camera Obscura works, featuring masterfully layered images of outdoor scenes organically projected onto quiet indoor scenes or intimate patches of nature. Liminal Spaces will be on view at Foto Relevance from May 26 through July 8, 2023.
Morell’s use of the camera obscura technique is inspired by his long fascination with the passage of time and how it can be captured through photographic mechanisms. His classic camera obscura works bring the outside in, creating a new and fleeting environment meant for our eyes only. Morell deftly balances a philosophical approach with a scientific rigor; honoring a Modernist tradition, he continues to experiment even with the boundaries of camera obscura technique, in recent works adapting a tent in order to take images en plein air. The effects of these images reference back to Impressionist painting where famous vistas are juxtaposed with unexpected, nontraditional surfaces, a marriage of two outdoor realities.
Abelardo Morell lives and works in Boston. He studied at Bowdoin College and holds an MFA from Yale University and an honorary doctorate from Bowdoin. In 1993, he was the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Until 2009, Morell was a professor of photography at Massachusetts College of Art. Morell was the subject of the documentary film Shadow of the House in 2007. He has published eight books, including Book of Books, Flowers for Lisa, and his illustration of Alice in Wonderland. His works are held in numerous private and public collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Art Institute of Chicago; Fondation Cartier, Paris; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.