The Front Room Presents:
ZOE WETHERALL
“Living Lines” solo exhibition
September 14th-October 13th, 2024
Opening Reception Sat. September 14th, 4-6
Fri-Sun 12-5 & by appt
Front Room is proud to present the photographic works of Zoe Wetherall. This is Wetherall’s 2nd solo exhibition with Front Room Gallery and her first in our Hudson exhibition space. In this exhibition of semi-abstract aerial photographs, Wetherall focuses on the geometry created when manmade and natural objects come together. From a few hundred feet Wetherall photographs straight downward, excluding the horizon, sky, or any visual reference point. Wetherall sees subtle patterns hidden in architecture and landscape. The lack of a visible horizon flattens the perspective and depth and accentuates the subtle textures, geometric patterns and hues.
Wetherall photographs from the basket of a hot air balloon, giving an element of performance to her photographs, albeit from behind the lens. This tenuous method allows her a certain amount of control of the elements around her like distance and timing. She can make decisions before and during the shooting, but she can not go back and retake a landscape that she has gently wafted over.
Wetherall’s photograph “Light and Dark” reads like a Mark Rothko painting, with two thirds of the horizontal surface as a field of mottled brown, and one third as a light grey and beige impasto. The textures feel as if they have been scraped on with a palette knife. On closer inspection the small rectangles and squares in the center are a broken fan and a small cart. What had seemed to be a color field painting is a photograph taken from a balloon over Charlottesville, VA.
Zoe Wetherall, “Light and Dark” (Charlottesville, Virginia, USA)
Zoe Wetherall, “Hint of Green” (Yarra Valley, Victoria, Australia)
In “Hint of Green” (photographed in the Yarra Valley, Victoria, Australia) the ground appears to have been completely scraped down on the left half of the photograph, save for a looping horizontal gouge midway through the composition. The “gouge” is an arroyo that becomes a lush green oasis exactly when it crosses the horizontal midpoint of the photograph. The entire right side of the photograph is several shades darker than the left, and the texture of the ground is different. The oasis is bordered exactly by squiggly lines going diagonally from the right corner to the top center of the composition.
Wetherall is an Australian photographer who now lives in New York with her dog, Pixel. She has won numerous photography awards in Tokyo, Moscow, New York, Los Angeles, and Australia, and others. Some of these photographs were recently exhibited in a two person exhibition at the Australian Consulate in Manhattan and solo exhibition at the American Australian Association. Her work can be seen in the Harvard Business Review, and LensCulture, Design Boom, American Photo, and Meer Magazine, amongst others.
Photographs are archival pigment prints, signed and editioned by the artist:
20”x 30” edition of 5: $1,800 unframed, $2,350 framed
28”x 40” edition of 5: $3,200 unframed, $4,050 framed
40”x 60” edition of 5: $4,200 unframed, $5,400 framed
