Yesterday I paid a visit to Sophie Brechu-West at her very own 571 Projects (http://www.571projects.com/). Sadly, I had missed the very successful opening she held last week for her latest show: Silentscapes by Liz Engelhardt, and I couldn’t resist a private viewing.
One the whole, the works themselves evoke Impressionism, even being created en plein air, but the color palate Engelhardt imposes on these landscapes speaks more to black and white photography capturing a moment in our natural history.
The gallery space is small and intimate, but the pair of large windows that practically fill one wall provides intense natural light that makes the space seem much more grand. This sunlight floods in and only serves to highlight the gradations of color (black, white, gray with touches of blues) inherent in these seemingly monochromatic landscapes. These gradations of color serve to unite the works, though they were taken from disparate locations. Some were done in Cape Cod, Massachusetts and others were created on location in Long Island, New York, but you’d never know it.
Sophie has an excellent eye for curating these works. They complement and speak to one another seamlessly. The landscapes almost create a narrative as your eye moves around the gallery, like the illustrations of a children’s book. As they speak to one another, one doesn’t want to interrupt the conversation, and at the same time you want to take a few with you to see what they have to say in your own home.
