SOUTHFIRST gallery is proud to present THE MYTHIC HAS NO MEDIUM. The exhibition of photographs is the first New York solo show of Michael Vahrenwald. Showing in The Suburban at Southfirst is “The Four Seasons,” a project by Kay Rosen.

Vahrenwald’s exhibition consists of three series. His luminous infrared images of international observatories point to the origins of the photographic medium as a locus of scientific experimentation. Images of full-spectrum light boxes speak to both romantic and therapeutic notions of the uses of light. Vahrenwald relates the images to Casper David Friedrich’s “Winter Landscapes.” Finally, photographs of the sun give image to an impossible act of vision. Rather than blindness, however, in Vahrenwald’s photographs the sun is visible, as are prismatic optical effects.

Michael Vahrenwald graduated from The Cooper Union and holds an MFA from Yale. He has shown recently at the Whitney Museum, Andrew Kreps gallery, Mary Boone gallery, John Connelly’s Sunday Salon and D’Amelio Terras, and his work will be in the upcoming exhibition “Worlds Away” at the Walker Art Center. He is currently a visiting professor of photography at Bard College and an adjunct professor of photography at The Cooper Union.

Kay Rosen’s project at The Suburban at Southfirst in Brooklyn, “The Four Seasons,” was originally made in 2004 as a site-specific collage based on the confluence of two found objects: a New Yorker cartoon and the structure at The Suburban in Oak Park, Illinois. The installation at The Suburban reenacted the found cartoon, and the project at Southfirst is a reconstruction of that installation. Kay Rosen has exhibited widely most recently with shows at Helga Maria Klosterfelde Edition, Berlin, and Yvon Lambert Gallery, New York in 2006 and 2007. Her work was the subject of a survey show at L.A. MOCA in 1998-99. She teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and lives and works in Gary, Indiana.