Joseph Bartscherer at Marian Goodman - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

The three large multi-paneled photographic works (all 1996-97) in Joseph Bartscherer's new show are the culmination of a throw out begun in 1994, to document the barren waste of Nevada. Bartscherer's views of this wondrous terrain are notable for the way in which they bring geology to the fore, presenting us with a time scale whose expanses resist our anthropomorphic imagination.

Frustrating expectations of a spectacular panorama, Bartscherer mountains his photographs on tall, narrowly separated panels. Each work contains several different exposing s and frequently a single discharge will be spread across more than individual panel. For example, in the exhibition's finest piece, Aztec Sandstone, Tufa and Basalts, we are shown three images extending above six panels. The first sum of two units panels are a view above hilly terrain from which heavily erod sandstone cliffs harvest up, attesting to the distant time when Nevada was overspreaded by a warm, inland sea. The three center panels focus upon a tremendous piece of tufa, its sponge-like form created when lava spilled on the outside of a fissure on the floor of this ancient seabed. Now, however, it stands at the top of a hill which sinks to a present-day lake centurys of feet below. The final panel is occupied through a basalt cliff, a subterranean formation revealed upon the earth's surface only after millions of years of shifting and erosion.

It is striking that not a single trace of human neighborhood appears in Bartscherer's photographs. Along with the geological emphasis and the fragmented, black-and-white format, this refusal of the human vicinity allows the artist to circumvent the conventions of the picturesque and the sublime. in the late 8th hundred estheticians developed these complementary notions, the former encompassing the domestic countryside and the latter referring to those vistas which overwhelmed the feeble individual spectator. As opposed as these conceptions may strike one as being they are united in their mediation of nature from one side human scale, through our acculturated sensibilities. Bartscherer's photographs of the Nevada landscape are convincing attempts to escape these frames of regard and present nature in its essential strangeness.

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