Frequently the woods are pink
Maxine Henryson

GALLERY I

Maxine Henryson, Anemone, “tears/new beginnings” (detail), Montauk, New York, 2022, Archival pigment print from film, 51 x 34 inches, Edition 1 of 3.

May 27 – June 25, 2023

Opening reception: Thursday, June 1, from 6–8pm

Pop Up Artist Book Fair: Saturday, June 10, from 12–7pm

A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce Frequently the woods are pink, a solo exhibition by New York-based artist Maxine Henryson, and the artist’s fourth exhibition at the gallery. Henryson introduces a new body of work that intermixes large and medium-sized photographs with non-linear narratives in small leporellos. By using variations of the blur—through depth of field, movement, and intentional soft focus—Henryson captures photographic imagery that favors feelings and memory over traditional representation. Her poetic, painterly approach celebrates light and color.

The exhibition title is taken from Emily Dickinson’s sonnet of the same name. Like Dickinson, Henryson concentrates on her garden and surrounding woods, celebrating nature’s interdependent splendor. Isolated in her Lincoln, Vermont cabin during the COVID pandemic, Henryson observed the plants, trees, and flowers of her surroundings, photographing their seasonal transformations.

Henryson’s photographs focus on the ephemeral and magnify the interplay between the flowers in her garden and wild vegetation. She creates images that are subjective and often abstract, with a sensibility of the sublime. These luminous images, such as Crabapple tree, “Love/Joy,” and Anemone, “tears/new beginnings,” can be seen as metaphors, a form of meditation where the images are more atmospheric than descriptive, encouraging the viewer to consider the very act of looking. Similarly, in the leporellos A Dream of Gardens and To be a Flower is profound Responsibility, the viewer is taken on a visual journey through the natural world.

The shift in scale from the large prints to the intimate leporellos allows the viewer multiple readings of the same scenes and the opportunity to question the perceptual aspects of the photograph. In Frequently the woods are pink, Henryson’s poetic, often fragmented images lyrically synthesize abstract with documentary, real with imagined, and everyday with extraordinary.

During the exhibition, Maxine Henryson and Lauren Simkin Berke will host a Pop Up Artist Book Fair at A.I.R. Gallery on Saturday, June 10, from 12:00pm until 7:00pm. Participants include A.I.R. artists Susan Bee, Lauren Simkin Berke, Yvette Drury Dubinsky, Maxine Henryson, Rosina Lardieri and Kay Turner, Joan Snitzer, Erica Stoller, Nancy Storrow, Jane Swavely, and others to be announced.

Maxine Henryson (b. Jackson, Mississippi) lives and works in New York. A photographer and bookmaker, she creates work about the search for cultural interconnectivity, nature, and the feminine. Henryson has an acute sensitivity to light and color, the interplay of which forms the basis of her photography. Her photographs have been widely exhibited in the United States and Europe and are in numerous private and public international collections, including: the Middlebury College Museum of Art, VT; the former Celanese Photography Collection, Frankfurt; the Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg; and Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions at: Southern Vermont Art Center, Manchester; P.P.O.W., New York; Santa Monica Museum of Art, Los Angeles; the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; Usdan Gallery, Bennington College; A.I.R. Gallery, New York; Kleinschmidt Fine Photographs, Wiesbaden; ARC Gallery, Chicago; Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs; The Kochi-Muziri Biennale, Kochi; and Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, among others. Henryson has taught photography professionally since 1975, most recently at the International Center of Photography, New York (1989–1997) and Bennington College (1996–2006). She has chaired or co-chaired the Fellowship Program at A.I.R. Gallery, New York since 2013. As an editorial photographer, Henryson was published in the New Yorker, The New York Times, New York Magazine, and Namarupa, Categories of Indian Thought, among others. Henryson’s monographs include I-DEA, The Goddess Within: Hunter Reynolds and Maxine Henryson (Artist Publications, 2022), Ujjayi’s Journey (Kehrer, 2012), Red Leaves and Golden Curtains (Kehrer, 2007), and Presence (Artist Publications, 2003). She studied sociology at Simmons College (B.S.) and University of London (Masters of Philosophy) and has a M.A.T. from the University of Chicago in Studio Art and a M.F.A. from the University of Illinois at Chicago in Photography. Henryson has received the Sam and Dusty Boynton Artist Fellowship, Vermont Studio Center in 2015, 2017, 2018, 2020, 2022. Henryson co-organized, with Lauren Simkin Berke, A Feminist and Queer Art Book Fair 2020, A.I.R. Artist Books at Printed Matter Virtual Art Book Fair 2021, and A.I.R. Mini Artist Book Fair 2023. She is represented by A.I.R. Gallery, New York.

For more on the artist, please visit www.maxinehenryson.net

View the Press Release here.

View Maxine Henryson’s page here.

Recent Press: Yohanna M Roa, “Maxine Henryson, Zoila Andrea Coc-Chang (鄭慧蘭), Keli Safia Maksud at A.I.R.”, Whitehot Magazine, July 2023, https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/maksud-at-i-r-/5881.

Photography: Sebastian Bach