Jeffrey Rothstein • Von Lintel Gallery

Sep 20

Both Directions At Once

In this new chapter of his Zion series, inspired by his visceral experiences in the otherworldly landscapes of southern Utah, Jeffrey has created a deeply mystical and hallucinatory body of work, entitled Both Directions at Once.

The title refers to a conversation John Coltrane had with the great saxophonist Wayne Shorter during a recording session in the 1950s about the evolution of his jazz compositions: “....about starting a sentence in the middle, then going to the beginning and the end of it at the same time... both directions at once.”

For Jeffrey, this dialogue between these two jazz greats was an “aha!” teaching moment as it was the nexus of his art practice in the field; to have an inner dialogue with the landscape, to be in the “middle”, to embody both the spirit and to be moved close to tears by its’ beauty- the “beginning” the reason he keeps going back time and time again to these spaces and at the same instant to be utterly open to the moment and to capture that energy on film, “the end.”

In creating Both Directions at Once, Jeffrey wants to bring the viewer into his hallucinatory experience, to see these landscapes as he witnessed and experienced them, a magical place filled with overwhelming beauty and strangeness, humbled by the immense expanse of time and grounded in a certainty that these ancient landscapes are very much alive and speak to those who are attuned to listen.

Von Lintel Gallery

2525 Michigan Avenue, Unit A7, Santa Monica, CA 90404
September 5th - October 14th, 2023
Tuesday - Saturday 12pm - 6pm

Artist Bio

Jeffrey Eric Rothstein is an American photographer and avid darkroom printer who is challenging and reinvigorating the American Western landscape tradition and exploring other non-traditional methods of making photographs. His work revolves around the analog film process, specific periods of painting, color, mysticism, abstraction, human connectedness in the digital age, and psychedelics. Jeffrey’s practice reexamines the history of photography and recreates an altered and heightened mental state that mirrors hallucinations. He is best known for his iconic landscapes based on Chinese paintings of the 8th and 10th centuries, The Zion Series: Plateaux of Mirrors (2010-present), a project born of his love of the western United States and his fascination with the intersection of painting and photography. His new work, a continuation of the Zion series subtitled Both Directions at Once, is a more profound journey through the primordial landscapes of southern Utah and his ecstatic vision of his experiences in those spaces.

As he sees it, the line between perception and hallucination is not as crisp as we like to think. In a sense, when we look at the world, we are hallucinating all the time. One could almost regard perception as choosing the one hallucination that best fits one's perception, the bridge when one thing appears and the other disappears. This is the space he looks to create in his work. These extraordinary landscapes appear and change according to his emotions and thus reveal the magic and beauty contained therein while mirroring the artist's qualities.