Karen Halverson: Survey: @ Robert Klein Gallery (38 Newbury Street)

This summer, Robert Klein Gallery explores landscapes and human nature with two distinct exhibitions of photographs. Survey, which features photographs of Iceland and the American West by Karen Halverson, opens July 10, 2014, at Robert Klein Gallery (38 Newbury St). Iran,Untitled, a 2013 series by Gohar Dashti, will be shown in its entirety at Robert Klein Gallery @ Ars Libri (500Harrison Ave) beginning with a First Friday reception on Friday,July 11, 2014 from 5:30 to 7:30 PM.

Survey is Karen Halverson’s first solo show at Robert Klein Gallery.Although she is not overtly polemical, Halverson does aim to show the multiple facets of any situation through her work, which explores “how we encounter, occupy, and alter the land.”She looks for man made traces, large and small, on the landscape. What she finds maybe indistinct–a wire fence in the background, made ghostly by the fog, as inValley Oak,Cosumnes River Preserve, California, 2000–or blatant, as with a weathered orange shed and gravel road in North of Hveravellir, Iceland, 2012.

There is an ebb and flow to these images,often as subtle as clouds moving across the sky, that affords the viewer “pasture enough for [the] imagination,” to quote Henry David Thoreau. These are not decidedly environmentalist pictures nor are they intended purely for decoration. They are not landscapes in thetraditional sense of the genre. Instead,employing scale and humor for effect, these photographs document mankind’s eternal struggle with nature: the battles it wins and the battles it loses.