Huxley-Parlour gallery is delighted to announce the first UK exhibition by American artist, David Benjamin Sherry. Sherry’s practice examines the mythologies and iconography of the American Midwest, while opening them up as sites for queer potential. 

Sherry’s photographic practice bears witness to the changing landscapes of the Western United States. Reinventing the well-trodden views of the country’s national parks, Sherry’s landscapes are each rendered in a single, vivid colour. In doing so, Sherry seeks to challenge the West’s colonialist trope of the individualist, with all its corollary connotations of straightness, whiteness and maleness, to present a more inclusive discourse around the region and its preservation. 

Echoing the American landscape photographers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Sherry works with a wooden-framed 8 x 10 inch large format camera. He weaves together the tradition of large-format landscape photography with issues of identity in order to recontextualise and preserve these lands. Sherry mural-prints his colour photographs with an alternative darkroom process, in which he creates vibrant monochrome washes that veil each image. 

The landscapes included in Mother are made where the artist resides, in the American West - specifically, California, Utah, and New Mexico. Sites include Yosemite Valley and Joshua Tree and range from the highest mountains of California to the lowest desert on Earth. Sherry’s work traces its roots to his own personal climate grief, as he experiences the loss of entire ecosystems firsthand. He states that he uses photography ‘as a means to see, understand and commune with our sacred landscape in new, provocative ways.’

This exhibition reveals how, through a nuanced interplay of colour, form and scale, Sherry’s work promotes an urgent liberation of ecological and queer potentialities. At a time when reconnection with landscapes and ecosystems may be essential for our continued existence, this exhibition displays how Sherry offers new, empathetic and sublime ways of viewing the natural world. 

Sherry (born 1981) studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and Visual Art before graduating with an MFA in photography from Yale University in 2007. His work has been the subject of the monographs, It's Time (2010); Quantum Light (2013); Earth Changes (2015); American Monuments (2015) and most recently Pink Genesis (2022). His photographs have been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, PS1 MoMA, New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the International Center of Photography, New York, the de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA, Ballroom Marfa, Texas, and the Tucson Museum of Art, Arizona. His work is held in the permanent collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, The Saatchi Collection, London, The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Florida, and The Marciano Foundation, Los Angeles, CA. He lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.