CJ Heyliger: VVVVVVVVVVVVV

VVVVVVVVVVVVV

CJ Heyliger

 

CJ Heyliger photographs a wide variety of landscapes—from vast desert regions to shimmering expanses of ocean—but their exact locales matter less to him than the camera’s ability to reveal their alien beauty and hallucinatory detail. Heyliger’s approach to mapping these places on film reduces them to their most basic elements—simply light and time. His nearly abstract black-and-white images challenge us to see familiar subjects in entirely new ways and wield an uncanny power to conjure up the topographies of personal memory.​

 

—Karen E. Haas
Lane Senior Curator of Photographs
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

V, 2020
Carbon Pigment Print
30 x 45 inches, Edition of 5

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This series is an attempt at reconciling the camera’s interpretation of the world with my own and seeking out images that are uniquely photographic in their depiction of light, time, and space. Photographs are revered for their fidelity, and we expect them to depict their subjects in a manner that aligns perfectly within the human register of vision. We imbue the camera with the ability to see our same truth.

 

 

VV, 2020
Carbon Pigment Print
28 x 35.5 inches, Edition of 7

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VVVV, 2019
Carbon Pigment Print
35.5 x 28 inches, Edition of 7

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VVV, 2019
Carbon Pigment Print
35.5 x 28 inches, Edition of 7

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VVVVV, 2019
Carbon Pigment Print
40 x 50.25 inches, Edition of 5

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This body of work is directly inspired by the iconic 19th century seascapes of Gustave Le Gray, not only in regard to subject matter, but more importantly, in the experimental approach he took when it came to picture-making.

 

Le Gray embraced the flaws of the fledgling medium and worked around the limitations of photographic material to fabricate images that, while divorced from reality, still bear a resemblance to the human experience. In doing so, he presents the impossible as the uncannily familiar. Through different means, he and I have arrived at methods that allow a photograph to describe two divergent realities simultaneously on a single plane.

VVVVVV, 2021
Carbon Pigment Print
20 x 25.25 inches, Edition of 7

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VVVVVVV, 2020
Carbon Pigment Print
30 x 24 inches, Edition of 7

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VVVVVVVVV, 2019
Carbon Pigment Print
25.25 x 20 inches, Edition of 7

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VVVVVVVV, 2019
Carbon Pigment Print
25.25 x 20 inches, Edition of 7

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VVVVVVVVVV, 2021
Carbon Pigment Print
40 x 50.25 inches, Edition of 5

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VVVVVVVVVVV, 2019
Carbon Pigment Print
40.5 x 32 inches, Edition of 5

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VVVVVVVVVVVV, 2021
Carbon Pigment Print
32 x 40.5 inches, Edition of 5

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VVVVVVVVVVVVV, 2019
Carbon Pigment Print
32 x 40.5 inches, Edition of 5

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The passageways into these visual rifts are elusive and fleeting—demanding specific atmospheric conditions and existing on a threshold that can be found just before the film loses its capacity for description. It is here that I am able to find a truth beyond my comprehension or understanding — a mooring just beyond my reach and demanding tireless pursuit.

 

 

VVVVVVVVVVVVVV, 2018
Carbon Pigment Print
25.25 x 20 inches, Edition of 7

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CJ Heyliger lives and works in San Diego, California. He is a graduate of UCLA’s MFA program in photography after having completed his BFA at The Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University in 2006, where he was taught by fellow gallery artist Frank Gohlke. Heyliger’s work is attentive to the legacy of the landscape, both painted and photographed, in art history as well as to the deeply technical and trial-based aspects of producing work via analog film. Sustained interest in New Topographics artists serves as a point of departure for Heyliger’s practice as he re-negotiates the degree of inter-subjectivity between himself and the landscape. Some of his photographs, as he states, are “highly descriptive,” while his multiple-exposure photographs of mountain ridges, valleys and desert environments foreground the problems of any single image’s veracity.

View more of CJ Heyliger’s work here.

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