Return to Reason at Gallery Wendi Norris

Photography gets a fresh look at The Return to Reason, a successful first-time collaboration between Gallery Wendi Norris and Pier 24’s Allie Haeusslein, with works by Stephen Gill, Yamini Nayar, Chloe Sells, Lorenzo Vitturi, and Hannah Whitaker. The works subvert, refresh, and reconsider the discipline of photography and highlight its unique status within the realm of visual arts. Yamini Nayar continues to surprise with her C-prints of photo sculptures, where the familiar is rendered unfamiliar and three dimensions may occasionally feel like two. Selections from Lorenzo Vitturi’s much-acclaimed series Dalston Anatomy, vivid glicée prints and sculptural photographs which serve as formal and chromatic representations of his north London neighborhood, are so crisp and specific you can almost smell the yellow chalk and tropical fruits – an instance where photography stimulated the nose as well as the eyes. And Chloe Sells asks us to re-consider the hypnotic, soothing, and familiar landscape of landscape photography with her layered, manipulated prints of the Rocky Mountains. The feeling of an experience – whether it is the experience of the photographer as s/he frames subjects and reconstitutes the image, or our experience as visual consumers, jarred by the familiar rendered surreal, is articulated well by The Return to Reason and encourages us to reconsider our stance on photography.

Stephen Gill, Yamini Nayar, Chloe Sells, Lorenzo Vitturi, Hannah Whitaker, The Return to Reason, Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco, through 7 March 2015.