For the 20th Anniversary of Zona Maco art fair. Momentum will exhibit the photography of Holly Lynton (USA) and Aapo Huhta (Finland)
Lynton will exhibit work from her latest series and Monograph “Bare handed” While photographing for Bare Handed, The artist sought to resist long-standing art historical tropes of victimhood or suffering in representations of rural people, instead looking to portray people as empowered. Biblical and mythological allusions were created unexpectedly, leading the artist to see that cultural visual memory is a vital aspect of the work. Often these references resulted from an arrangement of people, as in Lunch, PEAS Farm, Missoula, Montana, or a single gesture, as in Sienna, Turkey Madonna, Shutesbury, Massachusetts. “By incorporating recognizable symbols, Lynton invokes cultural memories, the touchstones that form us as individuals and unite us through shared experience,” writes art historian Terence Washington.
“Many of Lynton’s photographs capture a kind of subtle mysticism present in everyday life, and in his essay, Terence Washington notes that “by incorporating recognisable symbols, Lynton invokes cultural memories, the touchstones that form us as individuals and unite us through shared experience.”
In this way, Lynton’s photographs celebrate her subjects and their spiritual convictions. Her series stands in contrast to the 1930s surveys of rural life performed by ten photographers commissioned by the Farm Security Administration. They documented the struggle of rural America, its poverty and its despair, and a number of their images, like “Migrant Mother” by Dorothea Lange, have become emblematic. Lynton’s pictures search for different mood, where people and nature are in better equilibrium.
Over the years, Lynton has built lasting relationships with the people in her pictures, and her photographs pay respect to their courage, dedication, and passion. Her visual narrative, with its distinct aesthetic and quietly optimistic sensibility, portrays an impalpable set of connections that weave the land back into our lives. Each photograph brings in a genuine personal story, and linked together, they remind us of the complexities and nuances that fill life in that rural America. That engaged and positive message helps to make Bare Handed a solidly good and exciting photobook.”
– Collector Daily
Huhta will exhibit work from three series of work, Gravity 2022, Omatandangole 2016 and Block 2014. Each of the series will be accompanied with its title Monograph.
Gravity: In his new austerely black and white work, Aapo Huhta fills his photographs with a darkness so impenetrable that it dissolves the horizon. This nocturnal void is inhabited by human figures that seem to be shrouded in milky mist or exist behind a veil of cosmic radiation. They are simultaneously both painfully corporeal and infinitely distant, almost like visual echoes from another dimension. These bodies give us no information on the space they inhabit, because their existence does not adhere to the familiar laws of physics.
Three-dimensionality is at peril when Huhta partly dismantles the figurative tradition of the photograph. Through the use of analog processes and methods, he creates works that warp space and time in a way that borders on the grotesque. There is a sense of great urgency in the way in which the artist distorts the contours of the human body: these beings are above all to be described as mortals.
Omatandangole is a series of work shot in the Namibian desert between 2016-2018.
”The photographs were taken in Namibia, but the work is really more of a work about the photographer’s inner life. “Omatandangole” is made up of high-contrast black and white images, interspersed with a few color images. And rather than being a purely descriptive record of what the country looks like, they are rich with symbolism, a testament to the photographer’s mind-set while working on the project.”
– Kenneth Dickerman, The Washington Post 2019
Block is a photographic essay, amassed as a set of visions, offering hints for storylines in a murky, dystopic scene of the city witnessed by a stranger. Focusing on gray, concrete features with some people as spectators, narrowing down the elements in the frame, driven most often by the observation of the shapes the light creates, it alludes to a mute perspective toward contemporary city life and the people’s role in it. Simultaneously it is a story where the photographer plays the role of a protagonist in the big city that throws a newcomer into its infinite whirl of new people and peculiar surroundings. Photographs for the series were shot in New York between 2014 and 2015.
