Assaf Evron

Ro Art Services is delighted to present a solo exhibition of Assaf Evron. If a Butterfly Ever Saw an Owl features work from several interconnected series, including Evron’s “The Anonymous Shapes of Words,” “I Want to Believe Sea Cucumbers Are Happy,” and “Is the Eye I Am Seen As Is the Eye I See Myself Through.” Each navigates the limits of photographic representation through formal experimentation in abstraction, objecthood, appearance, and symbolic systems. While being philosophical and literary inquiries, the works remain grounded in photographic materials and processes.

Past series by the artist have reflected on two central themes: cameras as language machines and architecture, both modern and ancient. The works’ formal and material presence have a matter-of-fact quality, highlighting the camera’s language of representation as the medium through which it communicates. The work presents the illusion of representation with an ever-present awareness of its construction and limitation, making the language through which the picture speaks central to the works.

One of Evron’s preceding bodies of work had centered on a temple, and the quarry in Jerusalem from which the stones had been carved. The works in If a Butterfly Ever Saw an Owl began when he transitioned from the man-made void of an ancient quarry, to the pre-historic voids of natural caverns. Titled “The Anonymous Shapes of Words,” the series began when his spelunking throughout the Midwest became portraits of the American landscape through its interior forms. A subject carved by millions of years of geological activity, they not only exist on a scale far-longer than human history, but have also formed some of the oldest exhibition spaces for human art. The series is printed on metallic paper, a material reminiscent of cave walls, with artist-shaped mats, whose geometric form and framed voids evoke the architecture by humankind. The images present cryptic depictions of gravity and form, a space where culture, nature, and legibility collapse into abstraction.

The second series, “I Want to Believe Sea Cucumbers Are happy,” was captured during dives in the Red Sea, where Evron used a GoPro along with an assortment of other cameras while scuba diving. An intimate series of sea cucumbers in their natural habitat, the portraits capture a creature who lives in an environment without gravity, but whose life is rooted to the sandy floor. Ancient worms passing the raw materials of their environment through their bodies, the sand-eating beings filter through space as creatures of cavernous nature and form.

While the first two series reflect each other, the third series mirrors itself. The focus of “Is the Eye I Am Seen As Is the Eye I See Myself Through” inspired the exhibition’s title, where photographs find the confusing forms of birds and butterflies in a conservatory. Composing their pictures with extreme focal or value ranges, the pictures play off what we know to be true, and what we see them to look like. The butterfly’s camouflage is both a visual language of survival, and a metaphor for the photograph itself; images whose language exists as a reference to an other, and altogether dissimilar, thing. The butterfly wears images of its possible predator, who sees only itself when gazing upon its would-be prey. Used in a manner to capture visual discomposure, the camera plays a speculative role lying between perception, self-recognition, and mimicry. Finding beauty in a language of misrepresentation, the work reveals the nature of the medium through which it speaks.