Marfa Book Co. hosts Chamberlin exhibit Friday-Sunday

MARFA – The Marfa Book Company will host an exhibition of new works by Marfa-based artist Daniel Chamberlin entitled “Ecstatic Camouflage” this weekend, March 9–11, with an opening for the artist on Friday, March 9 from 6–8pm.

According to the artist, “Ecstatic Camouflage is an explicitly psychedelic post-landscape photography.”  Indeed, these photographs make a break with tradition and do not call to mind the work of Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, Robert Glenn Ketchum, or Richard Misrach, though, ostensibly, they share the same subject.

Dan Chamberlin

The break may at first seem technical, a consequence of new technologies for manipulating images, but on further study, it becomes evident that it’s something else. For Chamberlin, that word is psychedelic or shamanistic.

“It is a post-landscape photography that explodes anthropocentric notions of perspective by way of repetition and rotation, an organic visual drone. It is an attempt at revealing my communion with the so-called “plant mind” of shamanistic lore,”  Chamberlin said.

Several of the photographs in “Ecstatic Camouflage” were taken locally, in the Chisos Basin and the Davis Mountains. Viewers may not immediately recognize these places, however, and not just because the artist avoids iconic, monumental treatments for his subjects.

For his exhibition at the Marfa Book Company, Chamberlin chose 10 pieces from an archive of hundreds taken in the Southwestern and South Central United States. The pieces selected are ink jet prints on canvas and range in size from three by four, to four by five feet in dimension.