In this series, Michael Flomen roams, searches, and composes in the night space. Within that infinite darkroom, far from the luminous noise of the city, he explores the truth and movement of the instant. His photograms are traces of ephemeral landscapes, captured outdoors: they are born from contact with a sandbank, an expanse of snow, or the water of a pond.
Duran|Mashaal is pleased to present Michael Flomen’s solo exhibition, “Poised at the Point of Midnight”.
In this series, Michael Flomen roams, searches, and composes in the night space. Within that infinite darkroom, far from the luminous noise of the city, he explores the truth and movement of the instant. His photograms are traces of ephemeral landscapes, captured outdoors: they are born from contact with a sandbank, an expanse of snow, or the water of a pond. Throughout the seasons, the artist grasps his environment by making himself one with the elements. With these elements he shapes a light-sensitive surface before exposing it to the illumination of a flash—unless it is the radiance of fireflies that reveals traces of wild grasses and sediments on negative films. Michael Flomen transforms a documentary process belonging to the origins of photography into a magical form of experimentation that knowingly makes room for whatever is random, faulty, or blurred, even as the process retains its accuracy. Once developed and enlarged, the prints reveal what our eye cannot see and our mind cannot easily imagine. The change of scale makes us dizzy as the magical traces draw us in to a dance of pareidolias.
Michael Flomen creates correspondences that bring micro- and macrocosms together. Calcination, ablution, and sublimation, as well as the phenomenon of incandescence, remind us of the various baths in which the image is placed in the darkroom (developing bath, stop bath, fixing bath, washing), especially since the processes of both alchemy and photography require a mastery of chemistry, temperature, and light. Poised at the point of midnight, bodies and worlds become one. - Manon Klein
Michael Flomen (b. 1952) currently resides in Montréal. For the last twenty years, this self-taught artist has used camera-less techniques to collaborate with nature. Various forms of water, firefly light, wind, and other natural phenomena are the inspiration for his picture making. Michael Flomen’s work is in the collections of George Eastman House, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Norton Museum of Fine Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Canada, Whitney Museum of American Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, amongst others.