Thursday September 4 will see photographer Djinn Carl E. Lewis’ historic work in, ‘Reflections in Black: A Reframing’, a group exhibition opening at NYU’s Tisch School of the Art, Center for Black Visual Culture’s Cooper Square Gallery.
An autodidactic visual artist for over 4 decades, Mr. Lewis is referenced in Dr. Deb Willis’, ‘Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present’. Carl’s imagery bridges the traditional and post-modern worlds of photography traversing the boundaries of materials and processes. The seed of his photographic career began capturing light-oriented imagery on still film, molten glass and 20×40 foot dynamic laser illusions, in 1979. Executed around 1988 the ‘Jinnagraph’ images are process-driven and image manipulated dye-destruction prints using a technique he created similar to the iconic Sabbatier Effect (solarization) of Man Ray. Selected for the exhibition is a ‘Who’s the Alien?’ limited edition archival print produced on Hahnemühle Metallic paper by San Francisco’s iconic print house, Dickerman Prints.
Carl has work in the collections of the Amon Carter Museum, Anacostia Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Fine Art Houston, and New York City Public Library’s Schomburg Collection. For her book, ‘Reflections in Black: A Reframing’, Dr. Willis’ chose one of the Mr. Lewis’ newer works from 2023, ‘J-H and the Dreaddie’. From the ‘iterations’ Facet this image utilizes Lewis’ digital marquetry combining elements of the Lumière Captureé, 20×40 foot laser images ‘captured’ with an analogue camera and slow film in 1980, with a photographic ‘iTrait’ of Wailers’ guitarist, Owen ‘Dreaddie’ Reid.
“In the beginning (that sounds so ancient) I was ‘capturing’ light and ‘concrete’ emotions on film, now in this digital era the ‘light is more used to transmit emotions, the movements of chemicals becoming the movement of 1s and 0s.”, muses Carl, “My sense of curiosity and experimentation is now focused on the ‘captured’ 20×40 foot laser illusions from the 1980s and the new AR/VR immersive technologies, reimagining ideas from 3 decades ago.“
‘Reflections in Black: A Reframing’ runs from September 4 to October 15 at the Cooper Square Gallery, 20 Cooper Square, New York, NY 10003.
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