smoke the moon is pleased to present Blue Monsoon, a solo presentation of paintings and photography by David Benjamin Sherry. The exhibition is the artist's first solo show in Santa Fe, where he works and lives. On view from July 14th to August 20th, the show will debut twelve paintings and six contact prints that define the acclaimed artist’s evolving reverence of landscape, light and spirit.

David Benjamin Sherry received his BFA in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design in 2003 and his MFA in Photography from Yale University in 2007. Over the last 20 years that Sherry has evolved as a photographer, certain undercurrents have remained: landscape, color, ecology and the queering of traditional forms. The federal cessation of protections of national monuments in 2017 gave impetus for American Monuments (2019), a series of technicolor portraits aiming to document, preserve and vitalize lands under immediate threat of energy-resource exploitation. Using a 8x10 inch large-format camera, the artist references the prominent landscape photographers of the American West before him—Edward Weston, Ansel Adams and others. Yet, his signature use of color, figure and underpinning ecological objectives bring a distinctively queer lens to his inquiry. 

As Sherry dives deeper into his subject matter, his resulting work has trended toward the manual. Pink Genesis (2017) presented a collection of photograms in characteristic monochrome. The suite consists of vibrant color field compositions created through a C-Print stencil and overlay method done in the darkroom. His technique is analog photography in its most alchemical sense, and the subsequent images are radiant and emotive. This is perhaps the most direct precursor to his current iteration of image-making: painting. 

Sherry’s painting process is a ritual. He spends several days mixing pigments to find the perfect hue; builds color layer by layer, softening gradients and creating a completely smooth, rich surface. The process is tactile, performative and also meditative. Drawing inspiration from Transcendental Painting Group artists like Agnes Pelton, Florence Miller Pierce and Raymond Jonson, as well as New Mexico icon Georgia O’Keeffe, Sherry distills the desert landscape into shape and color, transcending the bounds of realism. Sherry looks to painting as a holistic means of capturing, even embodying, the most sublime aspects of existence.

Fusing op-art with landscape, the innate sensuality that has always underlied Sherry's photography merges with its surface in his paintings. Organic forms blissfully reverberate along a spectrum of a singular pigment: Orange, Pink, Yellow, Blue play out respectively like the crisp notes of a chromatic piano. There is a wondrous clarity and ease to Sherry's interpretations that will feel familiar to those who have gazed into the desert and felt at home.

Please join us from 6:00 to 8:00pm on Friday, July 14th, 2023 to celebrate the opening of Blue Monsoon: new paintings by David Benjamin Sherry.

For more information please email hi@smokethemoon.com.