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© Grade Solomon

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Grade Solomon

Ridgewood, NY

Artist Statement

Solomon's “Twist” narrates the half-lived and the half-imagined. Photographed from 2019 to the present day, these images were produced while in transit across various state lines. Selected from Solomon's personal photo archive, this collection spins disparate events into atmospheric union.

Inside “Twist,” otherwise anonymous scenes are peopled by questions. The flipped car, bent light, and smoldering branches enchant the landscape with a curious and blissful estrangement from reality. The events appear re-staged but still unscripted. With time and feeling out of scale, reality becomes a piecemeal construction, carved out of pauses, surprises, and fading memories. Chaining together past events into a knowable shape, “Twist” renders clarity in a careful and deceptive confidence in how things once were. Solomon's images are textured by a similar pattern: a criss-crossed network of what it really felt like, what we think might have happened, and a blurred understanding of how things came to be.

Behind their elegant composition, the photographs are rife with collisions. There is nothing inevitable about the crash: the cause and consequence are out of frame, but the evidence remains. Solomon's images excavate our emotional territories to make sense of the event. As we confront a world that is always already happening, we engage “Twist” with an investigative eye. Soaking in its tender reprieve as we wade through this pool of images, we cast our gaze upwards and inwards. The visual axis turns counter-clockwise as we refuse to make use of history, forget about the future, and wonder what happened between here and there.

© Grade Solomon

Grade Solomon's Portfolio

© Grade Solomon

Artist Biography

Grade Solomon (b. 1999) is a Korean-American artist based in Ridgewood, New York.

He received his BFA in photography from VCUarts in 2022 and is pursuing his study with MATTE Institute. Solomon is currently a finalist in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition and his work is on view in The Outwin: American Portraiture Today at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. Solomon’s published work has been collected by institutions such as Harvard Fine Arts Library, New York Public Library, and VCU Special Collections.

gradesolomon.com

@castlesystems

© Grade Solomon

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