Michael Meyer
Direct Forms


                                                      ©Michael Meyer

January 19 to Feb 25, 2006
Opening Reception Thursday Jan 19, 6 to 8 PM

   Safe-T-Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of large-scale, black and white photographs by Brooklyn artist Michael Meyer. Meyer’s show, “Direct Forms,” emerges from his carefully conceived and imaginative examination of photographic degradation. The exhibit runs from January 19 to February 25th, with a reception for the artist on January 19th from 6 to 8.


   Michael Meyer’s photographs in “Direct Forms” are works that are both highly interventional and yet avidly infused with a Cagean embrace of chance. Bluntly, we are looking at prints made from traditional photographic negatives that have been allowed to slowly deteriorate under unfavorable conditions (excessive soaking and cycles of moisture and drying being two favorites.) Although the products of chance and entropy, the resulting images are filled with form and texture, they are both stark and intensely beautiful. We can discern vast landscapes reminiscent of satellite images of the Earth — or Mars, there are close-ups of the skins of Komodo dragons, and the paths of anti-matter particles captured in an elaborate bubble chambers. In the prints we may see the overall sweep of a landscape photograph, but because we are really looking at the structure of the negative itself, even the smallest details are perfectly revealed. Many of the forms in the prints have geological analogies, but then the forces at work on the surface of the earth – time, water and gravity – are the same used by Meyer to produce his negatives.


   For most of the history of photography much effort has been made to make the presence of the negative totally invisible in the final prints. Now, in the beginning of the age of non-negative photography, we have an exhibition highlighting the form of the negative itself. Meyer has eschewed one traditional role of photography – capturing the world as we see it – but embraced a second, documenting unknown parts of reality that we would not otherwise see.


   Michael Meyer is a recent graduate of the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. “Direct Forms” will be his first one-person exhibition at a commercial gallery.

Michael Meyer

©Michael Meyer