Into the Sun, 2009

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Installation at Dolphin Gallery 2012

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Robert Mann Gallery:

Gowin's work has always been simultaneously engaged with questions around belief, ritual and memory as well as the material status of photographic representation. As critic Lyle Rexer writes, "Elijah Gowin is the prophet of this longing, the diviner of such dreams. His work confronts the impenetrability of the world and the challenge of representing it."

In this series Gowin has transgressed one of the most basic guidelines of photography, and of the gift of sight more generally by looking directly into the sun. To look in this direction is to seek communion with its faraway, generative force. At the same time it is an act that courts blindness, as the capacity for vision potentially self-ignites under its own ambition, like Icarus's melted wings. The eternal light source is that which enlivens our world generally, and which enables photography's particular art. Gowin's images reach towards the transformative and the transcendental.