Dan Nathan - Paralland

Award winning film-maker and photographer Dan Nathan will be displaying a new series of images at the Serena Morton II Gallery in September 2016, one year after the gallery’s official opening.

For this series Nathan travelled to two separate locations, the Sahara Desert, and the border between Arizona/Utah in the USA and although one set of images was captured in America and one in Africa, what unifies them is the powerful and timeless effect of natural forces in melding and shaping both terrains. The two core themes for this series are Time and Erosion, both of which are evident in the ever-changing shape of both landscapes.

The concept behind this series of works takes the form of an exploration that contrasts the topography of these two extreme and opposite parts of the world. The images have purposely been drawn together and juxtaposed to create this series of graphic, monochrome compositions. The striations and contours depicted, although many thousands of miles apart, have the same timeless, organic textural imprint that nature has wrought over time.

A powerful constant that unifies this series is the shifting nature of sand – both desert and sandstone rock. These images reflect a constant reminder in Nathan’s eyes that nothing is permanent and so by freezing in time these particular moments of geographical stasis, he has created a way of suggesting permanence in a shifting landscape. To revisit them would reveal small but significant transformations in erosion and deposition and so these images capture moments in time that can never be replicated.

Nathan has chosen to include the time of each image’s exposure using Greenwich Mean Time to further illustrate the parallel nature of locations thousands of miles apart. The effect of time is fundamental to the state of evolution of these landscapes as through millennia they have been in a permanent, slowly-evolving state of geological metamorphosis.