-Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931
Rivalry Projects is excited to present In Time, an exhibition with Barbara Bosworth and Emily Sheffer. Longstanding collaborators and friends, Bosworth and Sheffer document the vastness and uncertainty of our natural world to examine creation, corporeality, and our tenuous relationship with a changing environment.
The sea - its serenity, volatility, and awe-inspiring ability to transform sky, water, and light - has forever captivated Barabra Bosworth. The works in this exhibition depict the sea, its emotion, and unbridled wildness. Using a large-format camera the artist trains her lens not only on the sea’s movements, but where the sky and water meet. In conversation with Romantic artists such as Caspar David Friedrich and J.M.W. Turner, Bosworth's photographs append a mystical sensibility to a place she pins as “Elsewhere;” a place beyond, blurred in the confluence of heaven and earth. Bosworth’s photographs seek an ineffable truth about the sea, paying special attention to its ecosystems and teeming life. By turns plaintive, romantic, and atmospheric, Bosworth’s photographs read as poetic records of the natural world.
Emily Sheffer’s photographs use clay and landscape as an entry point through which creation myths can be examined and unpacked. Driven by her interests in ancient visual culture, geology, and pottery, her images create a photographic experience that examines the earth itself as life-giving matter. Sheffer’s photographs in conversation with -and contrasted against- Bosworth’s serve to remind viewers of the genesis of the Earth; of how mountainous glaciers carved today’s canyons, and how waves of molten rock shaped the face of our planet and birthed the oceans.