“We know only what we do, what we make, what we construct; and all that we make, all that we construct, are realities.”
— Naum Gabo
Casemore Gallery is pleased to present Assemblage, an exhibition of recent photographs by Raymond Meeks, opening September 19, 5-7 pm. The exhibition presents pictures Meeks made of abandoned and ruined welding and wood-shop structures taken over 18 months at a worksite along the outskirts of Kingston, NY (in the hamlet of Cranesville, NY). In these images, we see his own active interventions among the detritus left behind, utilitarian relics from which he created provisional sculptures and aesthetic compositions, temporary assemblages for the camera that, caught by his camera, breathe a second life and new consideration into the formerly quotidian.
Tweaking artistic notions of assemblage while taking cues from Russian Constructivism, the early 20th-century movement concerned with constructing a new social/material reality, Meeks’ work here is concerned with a more intimate question of how humans construct reality—and themselves—from what they inherit. If the original Constructivists were interested in constructing a future, Meeks sees his work as interested in constructing meaning from what remains of the past. As he himself says, “I’m intensely fascinated with merging my own idiosyncratic sensibilities with those of past makers. In this sense, this work is an homage to the laborer-artist, advancing their works alongside my improvisations as a collaboration between past and present.”
Images included in the exhibition reflect the intensity of Meeks’ concerns as a maker. Whether working in color or black and white, his grasp of print techniques is intuitive and masterful, always on confident display as he intermixes traditional printmaking with transparencies or different paper types and even used book pages. The images are presented not just on the walls, but in book cradles and rough wooden tables, where they are mingled with ephemera and actual detritus from the sites themselves, bringing the past even more into the present in the exhibition experience. Rounding out the exhibition are a scattering of images from previous bodies of work that share a through line with the Cranesville pictures, including Halfstory Halflife and The Inhabitants.
Despite living in the vicinity of the Cranesville worksite for four years before discovering the sites in these images, Meeks does not consider his discovery fortuitous. “I always knew that something was back there, tucked away in the woods. But this particular year, for whatever reason, there was access to it, and I stumbled into it, and the clues were there. And suddenly it's the only place I wanted to be, an occupation that consumed me for the next three years. And there's just something about taking the most rudimentary of objects and constructing meaning and making something beautiful out of it that resonates with me. Even just that need to make a connection is beautiful.”
Raymond Meeks (Ohio, 1963) lives and works in the Hudson Valley (New York). He has been recognized for his books and pictures centered on memory and place, the way in which a landscape can shape an individual and, in the abstract, how a place possesses you in its absence. His books have been described as a field or vertical plane for examining interior co-existences, as life moves in circles and moments and events—often years apart—unravel and overlap, informing new meanings.
His work is represented in numerous private and public collections. He is the sixth laureate of Immersion, a French-American photography commission sponsored by Fondation d’entreprise Hermès. Exhibitions from this commission were held in New York (ICP September, 2023) and Paris (Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson September, 2024). The Inhabitants, a book made in collaboration with writer George Weld, was published in August 2023 by MACK
Raymond Meeks is a 2020 recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Photography and was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2022.
The process of becoming a maker, is a process of discovering the themes of my life, to search for the authentic sense of what it is to be human.”” - Raymond Meeks
