Blue Ablation

Press Release

Opening Thursday, October 16, 6-8pm

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to present Blue Ablation, David Benjamin Sherry’s sixth New York solo exhibition and his first with the gallery. The presentation features six large-scale photographs from his recent expedition to Antarctica alongside five new oil paintings.

Sherry’s longstanding engagement with the American West and humanity’s fraught relationship with nature takes an expansive step forward as he turns his lens southward to the glaciers and icebergs of Antarctica. In Blue Ablation, a title which references the destruction of glacial ice and, relatedly, our own bodies, the artist pairs large-format analog photographs, rendered in vivid monochromes, with abstract paintings inspired by the atmospheric conditions and ice drifts of this enigmatic landscape. Capturing both Antarctica’s sublime beauty and its rapid transformation under global warming, Sherry moves beyond documentation to confront change itself. This new body of work engages legacies of exploration and exploitation while deepening Sherry’s own focus on queerness, spirituality and our survival as a species.

Painting has become central to Sherry’s practice in the past five years, a shift that began in 2020 when the pandemic restricted his access to the darkroom. Extending his use of the monochrome and photographic language into canvases, Sherry’s paintings offer alternative visions of the Antarctic that reverently foreground entropy and transience. They move beyond fact into atmosphere, light and sensation—offering a lasting mental afterlife and connection, rather than a fleeting impression. Through these mediums in tandem, Sherry attempts to redefine landscape—not as passive scenery, but as deeply charged spaces which both reflect our past and presage our future.

David Benjamin Sherry (b. 1981, Stony Brook, NY) lives and works in Santa Fe, NM. He received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2003, and his MFA from Yale University in 2007. His work currently appears in ‘Shifting Landscapes’ at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and ‘Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene’ currently at The Anchorage Museum, Anchorage, Alaska. Sherry’s work was featured in exhibitions at International Center for Photography, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; University of Buffalo, Buffalo, NY; George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; The Nasher Museum, Durham, NC; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; PS1 MoMA, Brooklyn, NY to name a few. His work is in permanent collections at The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art at Rollins College, Comell Fine Arts Museum, FL; Hood Museum Museum of Art, Hanover, NH; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; The Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.