Miriam Böhm: At On
March 13 – April 25, 2015
2831A Mission Street San Francisco, CA 94110 USA
Opening reception: Friday, March 13, 6 – 8pm
Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 11 – 6pm
Ratio 3 is pleased to present At On, an exhibition of new works by Miriam Böhm. Debuting several new photographic series and the artist’s first set of sculptural works, At On combines Böhm’s continued refinement of layered photographic imagery with a new development of complex physical spaces.
Böhm’s recent works build on the investigation developed in her earliest photographic series; by repeatedly photographing arrangements of simple materials and reincorporating printed images into their source arrangements, Böhm arrives at a finished image that contains excerpts and iterations of itself. Sometimes modifying her images with overlaid materials, drawn lines, and in-camera techniques, Böhm’s approach to photography is fluid and expansive, adapting to the particular inquiries of each series.
Where her early series often depicted identifiable source materials, the photographs from Böhm’s new series have grown increasingly abstract. On close inspection, materials are still legible in her compositions, maintaining a relationship to the tradition of still-life and studio-arranged photography, but the images have shifted toward an increasingly spatial and sculptural notion of image-making.
Functioning as an extension of the three-dimensional spaces implied in her photographs, Böhm’s sculptural works bring viewers into active participation with perspective. Built of intersecting framed glass panes and precise photographic excerpts, Böhm’s sculptures inhabit a fixed physical space while suggesting an overlaid photographic space, changing in parallax with a viewer’s position. In both her sculptural and physical arrangements, Böhm’s camera and the observer assume multiple vantage points simultaneously – geometric planes oscillate between opacity and transparency, and objects appear to be both in front of, and behind one another.
At On, Böhm’s third exhibition at Ratio 3, runs in tandem with On At, her solo exhibition at Wentrup in Berlin. Her works were most recently shown in The Rudin Prize for Emerging Photographers at the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida. Böhm’s work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and included in The Anxiety of Photography at the Aspen Art Museum. Her works have exhibited in group shows at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Kumu Art Museum Tallinn, Estland; and Kunstforum NRW in Düsseldorf, Germany. Böhm’s works are part of the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Later this year, Miriam Böhm will exhibit at Galería Helga de Alvear in Madrid, Spain.