"As the mushrooms open and lift their caps black spores shower out and soon the ink follows, sinking back into the earth. Wrenched from their habitat and placed on paper these mushrooms perform... these pictures are a collaboration between the mushrooms and me."
- Olivia Parker
"I have created an entirely new aesthetic landscape... The delicate process of development mirrors the precarious situation of our Earth: resulting in imagery that is violent, urgent, and, amid its transitions, often unexpectedly beautiful."
- Gohar Dashti
Robert Klein Gallery is pleased to present two series exhibited in parallel: Olivia Parker's "Persephone's Graffiti" and Gohar Dashti's "Disappearing Nature," on view until May 4th, 2024.
In "Persephone's Graffiti," Parker captures the explosivity of ink-filled mushrooms native to her own backyard. As their emergence presages the harsh New England winter, reflections of skyscapes and persistent insect tracks that disrupt their pools of ink remind us of the beauty of life above ground. In "Disappearing Nature," Dashti deliberately mars bucolic Polaroid photos taken during her residency at MacDowell in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Her burning and peeling of these beautiful New England landscapes function as omens of 'future landscapes,' environments ravaged and lost at the hands of humankind. Robert Klein Gallery's dual exhibition places these series in conversation to witness their serendipitous visual and thematic kinship.
Olivia Parker began to make and photograph ephemeral constructions in 1973 after graduating from Wellesley College with a degree in Art History. She has had more than one hundred solo exhibitions and her work is represented in major private, corporate, and museum collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. Parker’s work has been published in four monographs and in numerous magazines in the United States and internationally. Her residencies include Dartmouth College, The Aegean Center for The Fine Arts, MacDowell, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and Cassilhaus. Parker was inducted into The International Photography Hall of Fame in 2019. She was awarded with an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts by Lesley University in 2022.
Born in 1980 in Ahvaz, Iran, Gohar Dashti received her MA in Photography from the Fine Art University of Tehran in 2005. She creates artwork using different media, including photography and video. In her most recent works, Dashti has explored, through her highly stylized, densely poetic observations of human and plant-life, the innate kinship between the natural world and human migrations. Fascinated with human-geographical narratives and their interconnection to her own personal experiences, Dashti believes that nature is what connects her to the multiple meanings of ‘home’ and ‘displacement’, both as conceptual abstractions, and as concrete realities that delineate and contour our existence. The result is a series of quirky landscapes and portraits, as lush as they are arch, inciting questions about the immense, variegated, border-eschewing reach of nature – immune to cultural and political divisions – and the ways in which immigrants inevitably search out and reconstruct familiar topographies in a new, ostensibly foreign land. She has been exhibited internationally in Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, Toronto, Paris, Berlin, Boston, and Milan.
