Jeffrey Milstein
Manufactured landscapes
Exhibition at Benrubi Gallery
Exhibition
February 20th - April 5th, 2025
BENRUBI GALLERY
529 West 20th St
New York, NY 10011
212-888-6007
Benrubi Gallery is pleased to present a Winter Group Show organized around the idea of the Manufactured Landscape. One could consider the “Manufactured Landscape” to be a norm of our modern world, which it is, and it is not a new concept for photographers to explore either. In this vein, we seek to see what an idea made into a household phrase with the work of Edward Burtynsky in a 2006 world looks like now. We have changed in so many ways since the now seemingly halcyon days of a pre-2008, pre-pandemic society. We have come to inhabit our digital spaces fully, and. In contrast, technology integration into fine art was inevitable, and photography has always been a medium of change. We must still highlight where those changes live, how they are executed, and why. Four gallery artists, Matthew Albanese, Jude Broughan, Kang Hee Kim, and Jeffrey Milstein, all use various methods to create these narratives within their picture spaces, investigating what a Manufactured Landscape in 2025 is. From the use of the intricate diorama to the reappropriation and integration of slices of life, to the use of photoshop as the cardinal gesture of the composition, and Milstein’s use of pure optics to disturb and disrupt, allowing the viewer to question the very nature of their own perception. This is where we find ourselves at the juncture of what is the gesture of the hand and what is engineered, a synthetic reality that, at its most impactful, is now something we are quite comfortable with. We are even comfortable with the new awareness that we may not know. We find ourselves fluent in the language of what creates these disruptions of perspective, and we find perhaps they are not so disruptive anymore; they are simply our world at this time, in this place.
About
Woodstock, NY-based Jeffrey Milstein was born in the Bronx in 1944. He received a degree in architecture from UC Berkley in 1968, and practiced as an architect before turning to photography in 2000. Milstein earned his pilot's license at 17, and his passion for flight led to his well-known typology of aircraft photographed from below while landing. The work was presented in a solo show at the Ulrich Museum of Art in 2008, as well as in a year-long solo show at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in 2012. In 2016 it was on display at the Brandts Museum in Odense, Denmark.
In recent years, Milstein has reversed the camera's direction, creating award-winning, unique aerial images of man-made landscapes that are iconic and emblematic of the modern world. These photographs have been recently shown in solo shows at Kopeikin Gallery, Bau-Xi Gallery, and Benrubi Gallery in 2017-2018. The National History Museum of Los Angeles County opened a permanent installation in 2017, which included a large-scale reproduction of Milstein’s aerial photograph of Beverly Hills. His aerial photograph of Newark Airport is a cover image for the catalog accompanying the traveling FEP exhibition “Civilization, The Way We Live Now”.
Milstein’s photographs have been exhibited and collected throughout the United States and Europe and are represented by Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles, Benrubi Gallery in NYC, Bau-Xi Gallery in Canada, and ARTITLEDcontemporary in Europe. His photographs have been published in New York Times, LA Times, The Guardian, Esquire, Fortune, Time, Harper’s, GQ, European Photography, American Photo, Eyemazing, Graphis, photomagazin, Die Ziet, Liberation, Wired, PDN, Esquire, Conde Naste Traveler, and featured on the CBS evening news with Scott Pelly. Abrams published Milstein’s aircraft work as a monograph in 2007, Monacelli published his extensive body of work from Cuba in 2010, and Thames and Hudson published LA NY, a collection of aerial photographs of LA and NY in 2017. Museums, including LACMA, the Smithsonian Museum, the George Eastman House, the Portland Museum of Art, and the Akron Art Museum, have collected his work.
