ORO Editions

Introduction

Craig Krull Gallerist

The trajectory of photography took a dramatic shift around the 1970s. Partly influenced by the advent of Conceptual Art, which questioned the nature of art-making itself, photographers explored and experimented with the physical properties inherent in the photographic process. Perhaps most importantly, they questioned what seemed to be an accepted belief that photographs told “the truth.” Even the word “photographer” was changed to “photo-based artist” in order to suggest the new range of possibilities. These artists recognized that photographs were actually an invented reality, and they began to stage their images in the studio, or within the camera itself.

Jenny Okun’s layered exposures create a synthetic Cubist approach to building a landscape. Since her original method involved advancing the film by small increments in order to create multiple exposures, her images included overlapping areas of overexposure, thus reminding the viewer of the process and properties of the medium. Now, Okun digitally seams her work together and, though we are culturally attuned to this type of practice, her works inject either a fine imbalance, or an odd sense of reconstructed harmony into what we believed to be a “real” landscape. Her work has always defined the point that landscapes do not exist in nature, but only in our minds.