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Raymond Meeks
Halfstory #7897 New York, 2017
Estimated Value: $1,500
Carbon pigment print
14.25 x 11 inches
Unframed
Edition 2/5
Signed, verso
Donated by the artist, courtesy of Casemore Kirkeby.
Over the course of multiple summers, Raymond Meeks has ventured the few miles from his rural home in the Catskill Mountain region of New York, to a single-lane bridge spanning the tributaries of Bowery and Catskill Creeks.
Beneath the bridge, a waterfall drops sixty-feet over moss-covered limestone toward a forbidding pond. The local youth have come here from time immemorial, congregating near outcroppings and around a concrete altar – a remnant of an earlier stone bridge. Most allow themselves a brief running start before launching their pale bodies into the void, where tentative suggestions of flight mark the response to gravity. Taken collectively, their gestures allude to ritual, a prayerful response to the exigencies of budding sexuality and a future rife with uncertainty.
Halfstory Halflife is a distillation of the photographs made in the shadows of these falls, marked each summer by the emergence of young adults perched at a precipice both in space and in their lives.
About the Artist:
Raymond Meeks
Raymond Meeks has been recognized for his books and pictures centered on memory and place, the way in which a landscape can shape an individual and, in the abstract, how a place possesses you in its absence.
In 2014, a mid-career retrospective of his books and prints (Where Objects Fall Away) was organized by Light Work in Syracuse, NY. The exhibition featured more than twenty books, including artist books, self-published and trade editions. His books have been considered as a field or vertical plane for examining interior co-existences, as life moves in circles and moments and events, often years apart, unravel and overlap, informing new meanings.
Raymond Meeks lives and works in the Hudson Valley (New York). His work is represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Bibliotheque Nationale, France, and the George Eastman House, with recent solo exhibitions at Casemore Kirkeby in San Francisco and Wouter van Leeuwen in Amsterdam. His book Halfstory Halflife (Chose Commune, 2018) was a finalist for the Paris Photo/Aperture Photobook of the Year Award. His most recent book (Supine), will be published by MACK in late 2020.
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