From
November 24 through January 9 Laurence Miller Gallery celebrates
Ray K. Metzker:
AutoMagic. This exhibition features over fifty
black-and-white photographs taken by this 78-year old master
photographer over the past fifty years in which the automobile plays a
pivotal role in the contest between light and shadow.
Forty of the photographs have never been
exhibited before.
From his earliest street
pictures taken under the El in
In the darkest recesses of a
parking garage, we discover a single shimmering tail fin of a late
50's Cadillac.
In a scene more Orson Wells than Woody
Allen, we witness a menacing shadow figure approaching a parked car,
intent unknown. In a blizzard, we join the photographer and a single
figure as they look at one another wondering why each other is
standing there in the cascading snow.
The show also reveals a more tender side of Metzker,
as we peer into car windows to see folks uninhibited within their
mobile shelters, including a sleeping man with a medallion, head
resting on the door; a man reading at the wheel of his damaged white
coupe; and a man at the end of long day, hand upon his head.
Metzker’s work of the last few years, fondly nicknamed Autowackies, are a brilliant extension of his earlier forays into abstraction, and are only made possible by the contours of our newest cars and SUV’s, which wildly warp the architecture and cloud formations reflected on their glossy surfaces.
The exhibition AutoMagic will be accompanied by a
new limited edition (500 copies) book of the same title.
