Grays the Mountain Sends

For Immediate Release (10/9/14):
Bryan Schutmaat: Grays the Mountain Sends
A solo show of color photographs
October 29, to January 11, 2015
The exhibition will open on Wednesday, October 29th with a reception from 6 – 8 p.m.

Bryan Schutmaat’s large format photographs of abandoned mining towns in the American West present us with a portrait of America that is somber, often melancholy in its observations, yet unabashedly romantic. The palette is strong, rich and consistent; the landscapes, interiors and portraits are compositionally uniform. Schutmaat has chosen to plant his flag squarely in the post-documentary school of photography. The photographs were produced from the real world and fold in the complex history of place but were not meant to serve as documents, rather they are very intentionally Schutmaat’s expression of his own artistic sensibility. His photographs depict, among other things, sweeping views of devastated, almost deserted towns, interiors of old homes, and portraits of the myriad of people who still inhabit these areas. One intensely compelling aspect of the work is its clear, unsettling duality; the natural landscape is beautiful yet ravished, the people seem stoic yet doomed. And Schutmaat has carried this duality through to the execution: the photographs are of a vanishing America , a sad, true homage to the old romantic scenes of the American West.

The second edition of Schutmaat’s award winning book of this work is now available. Published by Silas Finch, 2014.

Bryan Schutmaat is an American photographer whose work has been widely exhibited and published in the USA and overseas. He has won numerous awards, including the 2013 Aperture Portfolio Prize, Center’s 2013 Galllerist’s Choice Awards, the 2013 Daylight Photo Awards, and the 2011 Carl Crow Memorial Fellowship, among many others. In 2014 Bryan was selected for PDN’s 30 new photographers to watch; in 2013, Dazed Magazine named Bryan one of Paris Photo’s “breakout stars,” and he was chosen as a Flash Forward Emerging Photographer by the Magenta Foundation. His first monograph, Grays the Mountain Sends, was published by the Silas Finch Foundation in 2013 to international critical acclaim. The Washington Post and numerous other publications cited it as one of the best photo-books of 2013, it won the photo-book category in the New York Photo Awards, it was shortlisted for the Aperture/Paris Photo First Book Award, and it was acquired by libraries at the MoMA, New York and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. Bryan holds a BA in history from the University of Houston and an MFA in photography from Hartford Art School. His photos can be found in the permanent collection at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and numerous private collections. He lives in Austin, Texas.