We project humanity onto beaches. They can be existential, sexy, carefree, familial, debaucherous, nude, social or solitary;they’re also grand, natural wonders that give our small and intricate lives scale. No matter our impulse to imbue these blank stretches of sand and surf with dreams and anxieties: The vastness of water, with its lunar rhythms and lethal riptides, make the concerns of Homo Sapiens seem insubstantial. Beaches are a threshold of the unknown, a portal to the rare frontier whose wildness and mystery, however rankled by climate change, is untameable by technology.
Jon Setter (b. Detroit, Michigan, 1989) takes the beach as a chance to notice manmade environments. The New York City-based photographer, who lived in Sydney for a decade, has forged an international reputation based on pictures that reframe details of urban landscapes as fine-tuned compositions of geometry and hue, evoking hard-edged painters as much as his fellow lensmen. In [Sydney Beaches Project}, iconic stretches of Sydney and suburban coastline—Manly, Dee Why, Bronte, Coogee, Maroubra, Narrabeen, Tamarama, Bondi and Palm Beach—become backdrops to both human constructions and the labyrinth of the artist’s mind.
These sixteen prints reject the worn trope of the beach as a panorama with a dramatic horizon line and dainty whitecaps. Instead, poignant geographies enable Setter to capture miniature, mighty flourishes: how a shadow settles beside the window trim on a surf club, how a swath of paint bordering a rock pool radiates sunlight. The sky itself serves as another shade in his palette, a shape in his metaphorical scrapbook. Rectangles of cerulean seem carved out of buildings. His flat picture planes, which find abstraction within the commonplace, treat celestial, architectural and earthly elements as equal.
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