Oliver Wasow

Theodore:Art presents a survey exhibition of photographer Oliver Wasow’s work, spanning the years 1983 to 2017.

Oliver Wasow occupies a unique place in the history of photography. He began his career as a younger member of the Pictures Generation and has remained consistently in the vanguard of technological innovation and issues central to contemporary photographic discourse. His pre-digital work of the 1980s anticipated the seismic shifts brought on by the digital revolution today, addressing photographic veracity, the cultural production of spectacle, post-production practice, and questions of authorship and ownership.

In many ways Wasow’s work of the past three and a half decades is a record of a world in transition, a world moving not only from the analog to the digital but from the natural to the technological sublime. His images, influenced by popular culture, fine art and vernacular photography alike, are often filtered through the unsettling and seductive world of special effects. Of particular interest to Wasow are the ways in which the visual tropes of romantic landscape painting, advertising and science fiction overlap to suggest a world dictated by the twin emotions of fear and desire.

Wasow will be releasing a new book titled “Friends, Enemies and Strangers”. The book contain a wide selection of images both made and found by Wasow, and includes text and essays by the writer Rabih Allenmedine and the artist Matthew Weinstein; it will be published by Saint Lucy Press. The book will be available Spring 2018.

Wasow will also set up a portrait studio in the gallery during the exhibition. Appointments can be made for a portrait sitting by contacting Stephanie Theodore.