the heaviest flower: elijah gowin + colby caldwell opens at ucp’s paragraph gallery october 16

The Heaviest Flower, a two-person exhibition of recent photographic work by longtime friends and peers Elijah Gowin (Kansas City) and Colby Caldwell (Southern Maryland), opens at UCP’s Paragraph gallery, 23 East 12th Street, Friday, October 16, 6-9pm, and runs through November 12, 2009.  The artists will speak about their work at 6pm the evening of the opening. An 80-page, full-color catalogue is being published by Tin Roof Press in conjunction with the exhibition.

Tied together through their innovative inquiry of the materiality of photography—both artists use painstaking and elaborate processes for reaching their final images – the exhibition circles around themes of anxiety, loss, and the tenuous beauty of living.  Both artists have rich histories shooting film and making prints, and possess a love and certain reverence for “the machinations or the materiality of photography itself,” as Caldwell describes it. But these two artists live equally in the digital age, applying its tools—digital cameras, Photoshop, scanners—toward a merger, or accumulation, of the analog and the digital that mines the potential and properties of both. On one level, it is this investigation into the nature of photography and the photograph that is the subject of their work, but it is in the delicacy and subtlety of manner with which this course of investigation is pursued that the poetry and potency of the work of these two artists emerges. Read full press release.