Los Angeles-based photographer/filmmaker Osceola Refetoff’s brand new, previously unseen body of work “Chromatopia” – featuring beautifully surreal multispectral images of Coachella Valley landscapes – debuts in the three-person exhibition “Problematic Palms,” curated by art critic Shana Nys Dambrot. The show opened November 7 at the Marks Art Center at the College of the Desert in Palm Desert, CA. On Wednesday, November 15, there will be an artist’s reception from 4-6PM; Refetoff and Dambrot will be in attendance. “Problematic Palms” runs through December 15, and also features work by Francesca Bifulco and Andrew K. Thompson; regular gallery hours are Tuesday – Friday, 11AM-4PM.
The new series “Chromatopia” features multispectral exposures made with a camera sensitive to both visual and infrared spectrums, creating vivid and otherworldly color combinations in camera. Refetoff says, “My work has long explored human interactions with the California desert. Palm Springs’ stunning midcentury architecture and exotic landscaping presents a fanciful transformation of this terrain, a vision made possible by water imported from distant sources.”
In her curatorial statement, Nys Dambrot says, “Osceola Refetoff’s work with multi-spectral exposures creates arresting infrared images of iconic Palm Springs neighborhoods’ architecture, landscape design, and encroaching wild nature. The impossibly rich chromatic character of the work is in conversation with both Pop art and the technology of scientific survey; the assertive beauty they express contains the unease of invisible color, an inverted dance of naturalism and surrealism, and the seeds of a deeper consideration about the viability of putting a town in the desert in the first place. Lovely, sparkling, water-intensive, manicured, natural, unnatural, otherworldly, seductive, subversive—paradisiacal and problematic.
The “Chromatopia” work is exhibited courtesy of Melissa Morgan Fine Art. At the end of the show, the photographs will move directly to MMFA in Palm Desert, CA.
Pictured: “Duplexity” Multispectral Exposure, Palm Springs, CA,” 2023, ©Osceola Refetoff
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