Los Angeles-based photographer/filmmaker Osceola Refetoff has a solo exhibition, “Chromatopia”, opening at Melissa Morgan Fine Art in Palm Desert on Friday, February 2. It marks the premiere of this new body of work. There will be an artist’s reception from 4-7PM. The show runs through March 11.
“Chromotopia” 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.”
Art critic Shana Nys Dambrot wrote about this body of work, “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.”
Pictured: “Duplexity”(Multispectral Exposure, Palm Springs, CA, 2023) (c) Osceola Refetoff
