In his photographic images featuring cotton plants now on view at Chelsea’s Laurence Miller Gallery, John Dowell aims to ‘evoke the remembering, feeling and sense of wonder in African American ancestral strategies of survival.’ Dowell inserts cotton fields in photos of Central Park, Wall Street, Trinity Church and other famous New York sites, creating haunting images and recalling injustices inflicted on African American communities at these places and elsewhere. The show’s centerpiece, ‘Lost in Cotton,’ invites visitors to enter an enclosure of hanging panels that recall the artist’s grandmother’s frightening childhood experience of getting lost among tall cotton plants. (On view through Jan 25th).
