Jeffrey Eric Rothstein is an American photographer and avid darkroom printer who is challenging and reinvigorating the American Western landscape tradition as well as exploring other non-traditional methods of making photographs. His work revolves around the analog film process, specific periods of painting, color, mysticism, abstraction, human connectedness in the digital age, and psychedelics. Jeffrey’s practice reexamines the history of photography and recreates an altered and heightened mental state that mirrors hallucinations. He is best known for his iconic landscapes based on Chinese paintings of the 8th and 10th centuries, The Zion Series: Plateaux of Mirrors (2010-present), a project born of his love of the western United States and his fascination with the intersection of painting and photography. His new work, a continuation of the Zion series subtitled Both Directions at Once is a deeper journey through the primordial landscapes of southern Utah and his ecstatic vision of his experiences in those spaces.
As he sees it, the line between perception and hallucination is not as crisp as we like to think. In a sense, when we look at the world, we are hallucinating all the time. One could almost regard perception as the act of choosing the one hallucination that best fits your perception at the moment, the bridge when one thing appears and the other disappears. This is the space he looks to find – magic by another name – to create his work.
Jeffrey studied photography under the post war New York School photographers, Jerry Liebling and Elaine Mays and painting with Arthur Hoener, an early OpArt painter and student of Josef Albers at Hampshire College in the early 80’s. Post college, he was a photo assistant to the modern master Richard Avedon, and Bruce Weber while attending The Whitney Independent Study Program studying with guest artists Richard Serra and Brice Marsden.
Jeffrey’s diverse body of work deals with evocative meditations on the nexus of painting and photography as well as the themes of art history with respect to specific periods of painting and the contemporary art world itself. His photographic work adopts the scale and composition of historical landscape paintings, which are researched at length before embarking on to a specific location to photograph.
For his Zion Canyon/Plateaux of Mirrors series, he studied with a professor of Chinese Art history and a curator of Asian Art at The Metropolitan Museum for two years focusing on scroll paintings of the Tang and Song dynasties. This body of work is not about photographing the actual appearance of the natural world. Instead, Jeffrey distills his impressions as did the painters of the Song Dynasty to create works that idealize the natural world and emphasize the graphic qualities that enable him to translate nature into an essential impressionistic medium that conveys the energy and spirit of the landscape in a painterly abstract form.
In his new chapter of his Zion series, inspired by his visceral experiences in the otherworldly landscapes of southern Utah, Jeffrey has created a deeply mystical and hallucinatory body of work, entitled Both Directions at Once. The title refers to a conversation John Coltrane had with the great saxophonist Wayne Shorter about the evolution with his jazz compositions during a recording session in the 1950’s “....about starting a sentence in the middle, then going to the beginning and the end of it at the same time…. both directions at once.”
For Jeffrey this dialogue between these two jazz greats was an “a ha!” teaching moment as it was the nexus of his art practice in the field; to have an inner dialogue with the landscape to be in the “middle”, to embody both the spirit and to be moved close to tears by its’ beauty- the “beginning” the reason he keeps going back time and time again to these spaces and at the same instant to be utterly open to the moment and to capture that energy on film, “the end.”
In creating Both Directions at Once, Jeffrey wants to bring the viewer in to his hallucinatory experience, to see these landscapes as he witnessed and experienced them as a magical place filled with overwhelming beauty and strangeness, humbled by the immense expanse of time and grounded in a certainty that these ancient landscapes are very much alive and speaks to those who are attuned to listen.
With his on-going project, The Architecture of Mountains, Jeffrey has access to a low orbit geo-survey satellite as his camera. While the global landscape has been transformed by millennia of human occupation, his artistic expression has also been deeply imprinted with images of the natural world. Going beyond representation, these “landscapes of the mind” as he likes to call them are imbued with personal feelings to convey the inner landscape of the artist’s imagination.
Oblique Strategies, he continues his examination of painterly space. Making works that are both bold in their simplicity and geometric forms as his visual vocabulary is drawn from his love of geometric abstract art of the 1960’s and 70’s. Along with his passion for geometric forms of that era he then used black and white erotic images overlaid with colourful geometric forms to create the Geometries of LOVE series.
Born in Northampton, Massachusetts. He spent his early years in the Caribbean, attended secondary school in London but has always called New York City home.
BA- Hampshire College, Amherst Ma.
The Whitney Museum of American Art
Independent Study Program (ISP) NY
EXHIBITIONS
•Susan Eley Gallery/On the Rocks, New York, NY
•Kasher/Potamkin Gallery, Chelsea NYC
•The Tarn Collection/ Zion Mandala, England
•Lu Magnus Gallery/What the Thunder Said, New, NY
•Unwrap Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
•Susan Eley Gallery/Blaze, New York, NY
•Unwrap Gallery/Mie Gakure, Tokyo, Japan
•The New Erotic Museum, Los Angeles, Ca
•The New Erotic Museum, Los Angeles, Ca.
•Boltax Gallery- Summer Girls, Shelter Island, NY
•The Tarn Collection, London, England
•Paul Morris Gallery- New York, NY
•Paul Morris Gallery-The Armory Show
•Saibu Gallery/Summer’s Soft Song-Tokyo, Japan
•Baron/Boisante- Trippy World ,New York, NY
•Jason McCoy Gallery-Kansas City, MO
•Paul Morris Gallery-New York, NY
•Paul Morris Gallery-New York, NY-The Armory Show
As he sees it, the line between perception and hallucination is not as crisp as we like to think. In a sense, when we look at the world, we are hallucinating all the time. One could almost regard perception as the act of choosing the one hallucination that best fits your perception at the moment, the bridge when one thing appears and the other disappears. This is the space he looks to find – magic by another name – to create his work.
Jeffrey studied photography under the post war New York School photographers, Jerry Liebling and Elaine Mays and painting with Arthur Hoener, an early OpArt painter and student of Josef Albers at Hampshire College in the early 80’s. Post college, he was a photo assistant to the modern master Richard Avedon, and Bruce Weber while attending The Whitney Independent Study Program studying with guest artists Richard Serra and Brice Marsden.
Jeffrey’s diverse body of work deals with evocative meditations on the nexus of painting and photography as well as the themes of art history with respect to specific periods of painting and the contemporary art world itself. His photographic work adopts the scale and composition of historical landscape paintings, which are researched at length before embarking on to a specific location to photograph.
For his Zion Canyon/Plateaux of Mirrors series, he studied with a professor of Chinese Art history and a curator of Asian Art at The Metropolitan Museum for two years focusing on scroll paintings of the Tang and Song dynasties. This body of work is not about photographing the actual appearance of the natural world. Instead, Jeffrey distills his impressions as did the painters of the Song Dynasty to create works that idealize the natural world and emphasize the graphic qualities that enable him to translate nature into an essential impressionistic medium that conveys the energy and spirit of the landscape in a painterly abstract form.
In his new chapter of his Zion series, inspired by his visceral experiences in the otherworldly landscapes of southern Utah, Jeffrey has created a deeply mystical and hallucinatory body of work, entitled Both Directions at Once. The title refers to a conversation John Coltrane had with the great saxophonist Wayne Shorter about the evolution with his jazz compositions during a recording session in the 1950’s “....about starting a sentence in the middle, then going to the beginning and the end of it at the same time…. both directions at once.”
For Jeffrey this dialogue between these two jazz greats was an “a ha!” teaching moment as it was the nexus of his art practice in the field; to have an inner dialogue with the landscape to be in the “middle”, to embody both the spirit and to be moved close to tears by its’ beauty- the “beginning” the reason he keeps going back time and time again to these spaces and at the same instant to be utterly open to the moment and to capture that energy on film, “the end.”
In creating Both Directions at Once, Jeffrey wants to bring the viewer in to his hallucinatory experience, to see these landscapes as he witnessed and experienced them as a magical place filled with overwhelming beauty and strangeness, humbled by the immense expanse of time and grounded in a certainty that these ancient landscapes are very much alive and speaks to those who are attuned to listen.
With his on-going project, The Architecture of Mountains, Jeffrey has access to a low orbit geo-survey satellite as his camera. While the global landscape has been transformed by millennia of human occupation, his artistic expression has also been deeply imprinted with images of the natural world. Going beyond representation, these “landscapes of the mind” as he likes to call them are imbued with personal feelings to convey the inner landscape of the artist’s imagination.
Oblique Strategies, he continues his examination of painterly space. Making works that are both bold in their simplicity and geometric forms as his visual vocabulary is drawn from his love of geometric abstract art of the 1960’s and 70’s. Along with his passion for geometric forms of that era he then used black and white erotic images overlaid with colourful geometric forms to create the Geometries of LOVE series.
Born in Northampton, Massachusetts. He spent his early years in the Caribbean, attended secondary school in London but has always called New York City home.
BA- Hampshire College, Amherst Ma.
The Whitney Museum of American Art
Independent Study Program (ISP) NY
EXHIBITIONS
•Susan Eley Gallery/On the Rocks, New York, NY
•Kasher/Potamkin Gallery, Chelsea NYC
•The Tarn Collection/ Zion Mandala, England
•Lu Magnus Gallery/What the Thunder Said, New, NY
•Unwrap Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
•Susan Eley Gallery/Blaze, New York, NY
•Unwrap Gallery/Mie Gakure, Tokyo, Japan
•The New Erotic Museum, Los Angeles, Ca
•The New Erotic Museum, Los Angeles, Ca.
•Boltax Gallery- Summer Girls, Shelter Island, NY
•The Tarn Collection, London, England
•Paul Morris Gallery- New York, NY
•Paul Morris Gallery-The Armory Show
•Saibu Gallery/Summer’s Soft Song-Tokyo, Japan
•Baron/Boisante- Trippy World ,New York, NY
•Jason McCoy Gallery-Kansas City, MO
•Paul Morris Gallery-New York, NY
•Paul Morris Gallery-New York, NY-The Armory Show