Connecticut HQ Art

“In physics, redshift occurs when a heavenly body is rapidly rushing away. Adam Pape’s recent photographs, which view New York through a scrim of red and pink roses, convey a similar sensation of life receding at the very moment it is being experienced.

This series, from 2017 through summer 2020, took off from a group of pictures that Pape made of rosebushes growing by a police station in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, where he was living at the time. From there, the project evolved into a kind of scavenger hunt, with Pape roaming the city on a horticultural search for flowers that could occupy the foreground while, like a mannerist painter, he zeroed his camera in on what was occurring in the middle distance.

Lurid and moody, exaggerated yet naturalistic, these photographs, which Pape often shot at twilight, evoke a cityscape that is both fantastic and recognizable. It is as if the artist had stared hard at what was around him, shut his eyes, and allowed the afterimage, distilled and heightened, to register on his consciousness and then, as if in a darkroom, develop slowly and inexorably into being.”
— Arthur Lubow, from Aperture 232: “New York USA