John Opera - New Work

Davis Gallery at Houghton House
1 King's Lane, Geneva, NY

November 16-December 14, 2018
Reception:
 Postponed due to weather

Gallery Closed for Thanksgiving Recess November 19-November 23

This exhibition will contain new examples of the artist’s ongoing experiments with photographic techniques invented in the earliest days of the medium’s history. Since 2010, Opera has reworked traditional 19^th-century processes such as the anthotype and cyanotype, adapting their peculiar characteristics to the language of contemporary images and abstraction. Opera’s work pushes against the program of traditional photography and its histories, while simultaneously investigating its infinitely mysterious qualities as a chemical, physical, and even biological expression that points to as well as distorts our perceived experiences in the world.

John Opera is a photographer and educator in Buffalo, NY, where he is an assistant professor at the University at Buffalo. He received his BFA at SUNY New Paltz (1998) and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2005), and was based in Chicago for over a decade. Opera has exhibited his work nationally, and his work is included in the permanent collections of the DePaul Museum of Art (Chicago), the Burchfield Penney Art Center (Buffalo), and the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), among other institutions. His diverse body of work has included landscapes, abstractions, and a series shot in Western New York inspired by the paintings of Charles Burchfield. He is represented by DOCUMENT Gallery in Chicago.