Lynn Saville
Elevated
April 4 – May 18, 2024
Lynn Saville specializes in photographing cities between twilight and dawn, when the daylight gives way to moonlight, neon, and street light. Her night-time wanderings have taken her to ambiguous, transitional areas, leading her to capture sites and neighborhoods that are often deserted or overlooked. Stripped of human presence, our focus is drawn to fundamental elements of the city, such as bridges, billboards, and walls, that exist in Saville’s photographs for their own sake rather than components of urban living.
In her photographs of New York at night, the city appears suspended in time, as Saville captures the moment when one state of being is on the brink of becoming something else, when day turns to night, and night to day. In a more literal sense, Saville’s photographs map the transformation of the city as formerly industrial areas give way to residential developments. Shuttered storefronts and empty streets, often bathed in ambient, artificial light, acknowledge a rarely seen aspect of these urban landscapes, both mysterious and unsettling.
Born in Durham, North Carolina, Lynn Saville lives and works in New York City. She earned her BA from Duke University and her MFA from Pratt Institute. Her work has been widely exhibited in the US and abroad, including at The Photographers’ Gallery, London; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina; Tucson Museum of Art; and Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University. Her work can be found in numerous major public collections including National Portrait Gallery, London; International Center of Photography, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others.
Saville has published four monographs: Acquainted with the Night (Rizzoli, 1997); Night/Shift (Monacelli/Random House, 2009), with an introduction by Arthur C. Danto; Dark City: Urban America at Night (Damiani, 2015), with an introduction by Geoff Dyer, and Lost (Kris Graves Projects, 2018). Saville’s archives were acquired by the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University.
| Lynn Saville: Dark City, Urban America at Night Lynn Saville's Dark City photographs illustrate her exploration of urban America between dusk and dawn. In this series, she focuses on evocative spaces that are generally devoid of people. Vacant buildings, shuttered storefronts, and empty streets are the ostensible subjects of her pictures, but the natural cycle of decay and rebirth in urban ecology is at the heart of each of her landscapes of downtowns after dark from New York to Los Angeles. |
Into the Night: Modern and Contemporary Art and the Nocturne Tradition
Into the Night: Modern and Contemporary Art and the Nocturne Tradition examines the long tradition of the nocturne in art and how that tradition has expanded to encompass various ways that contemporary artists consider the enigmatic notion of the night. This exhibition is comprised of paintings, photographs, and works on paper that investigate the psychological concepts of darkness, the dreamscape and its connection to the night, and the inter-connectedness of the environment with cultural and artistic discourse.
Work by Lynn Saville is featured in PHOTO ID, a group exhibition at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, on display through July 7. The exhibition of photographs explores the theme of identity through the lens of self, society, and gender.
The Space in Between, an exhibition featuring the work of Lynn Saville, was recently on display at the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University, and is now on view at the Atlantic Wharf's Waterfront Square Gallery in Boston through March 22, 2013.
Lynn Saville's first monograph Night|Shift: Photographs by Lynn Saville, published by The Monacelli Press, was released in May 2009.
