Lynn Geesaman
Lynn Geesaman, 10-97-7c-8, Parc de Sceaux, France, 1997.
Lynn Geesaman, Damme, Belgium (4-92-152-4), 1992. Archival pigment print, 25 x 25 inches.
Yancey Richardson is proud to present Lynn Geesaman, an exhibition bringing together works spanning the entirety of Lynn Geesaman’s (1938-2020) career, demonstrating the depth of her exploration into the fragile relationship between humanity and nature. Marking the fifth solo presentation of her work with the gallery and first since 2010, the exhibition features work Geesaman made in parks and formal gardens in Europe and the United States, spaces where cultivation of the land transformed what was previously wild into expressions of civilization, control and beauty. Alongside her signature color images, the exhibition will also include a selection of black and white photographs from many of the same parks and gardens.
Though best known for her large-scale color photographs that are rich with atmosphere and mood, Geesaman’s emphasis on idealized, often dreamlike, settings also carried with it an attention to the ordinary and mundane. By exploring the artificial nature of these landscapes—their manicured and orderly qualities—Geesaman revealed how they have been rendered intelligible through the geometry and structure of their forms, which she emphasized over social or historical details. Though people are conspicuously absent from her photographs, evidence of their collective presence is always implied by the manicured and designed nature of the landscape, from symmetrical and precisely trimmed hedges to row upon row of expertly planted trees.
The tension in Geesaman’s work between order and disorder is also expressed by the movement between abstraction and representation. The ethereal quality of her photographs was the result of diffusion, a unique printing process the artist used to achieve blurred edges and a nearly out-of-focus quality, along with the soft dispersal of light throughout the composition. Though the technique recalls the early Modernist images of the Pictorialist photographers, Geesaman used it to achieve a photographic quality specific to her work alone. Rather than subordinate the documentary aspect of her photography to the graphic or the painterly, Geesaman used diffusion to create an intensification of effect, leading to images that are evocative and observational in equal measure. The formal landscapes that were often her subject are revealed to have potent emotional undercurrents, those that hint at the presence of hidden realities just beneath the surface of what is plainly seen.
The black and white photographs included in the project gallery of the exhibition attest to Geesaman’s power of poetic description and show the quality of her exposures and compositions before she applied diffusion. These haunting, at times even unsettling, images of the very same gardens and parks show her facility for transforming the ordinary into the surreal, the familiar into the enchanted.
Lynn Geesaman (1938-2020) was born in Cleveland, Ohio and graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in physics. She has won numerous grants and awards including the Bush Foundation Artist Fellowship in 1991, and the National Endowment for the Arts Regional Visual Arts Fellowship Award for the Midwest, 1993-1994. There are three monographs published on the work of Lynn Geesaman, Poetics of Place (1998), Gardenscapes (2004) and Hazy Lights and Shadows: Lynn Geesaman (2007).
Her work has been exhibited in numerous institutions including the International Center of Photography, New York; the Houston Center for Photography; the Center for Photography at Woodstock, New York; Tucson Museum of Art; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe. Her work is represented in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris.