Opening July 12th and running until August 3rd, Persons Unknown is thrilled to present a new body of work by photographer Dave Bush, entitled “NIGHT COLLECTING.”

“I pour myself a very little drink, watching, in the windowpane, my reflection, which steadily becomes more faint.  I seem to be fading away before my very eyes- this fancy amuses me, and I laugh to myself” —James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

Dave Bush has a fascination with reflective surfaces, his photographs show us why.  When we distill and flatten our looking through a screen or a pane of glass, we see two spaces dissolve and merge into one another, joining while remaining quite distinct.  We simultaneously look out towards the fuzzy distance and look back towards ourselves, like Baldwin’s anonymous narrator in Giovanni’s Room.  Windows invite reverie, particularly looking out over a quiet country night.  A pane of glass becomes a looking glass.  Inside and outside crushed and merged and flattened together, looking becomes unfocused, malleable and dreamlike.

Only In Bush’s photographs, stark white, green and orange bellies, like constellations, are scattered across the darkness of the night. Bugs are caught here, tiny burning galaxies describing a naked flat plane, invisible to us. These tiny little creatures, riding the membrane between reflection and transparency, are all that let us know a barrier even exists. Bush painstakingly composites these images from several photographs to maximize the effect of these tiny bodies, motes of dust, and scratches of spiders silk. Like an astronomer at a telescope, Bush is capturing light, layering it.  Tracing deep space, shallow space, accumulating and piling up tiny amounts of light and color, letting the image resolve by slow growth.  A universe in miniature.

Dave Bush received his MFA from the Yale School of Art. He went on to teach photography at Bard College for over a decade.  Currently on hiatus from teaching, Dave lives and works on a  farm in rural Pennsylvania.

NIGHT COLLECTING: Photography By Dave Bush will open on Saturday, July 12th at Persons Unknown Gallery.  Opening Reception from 7pm -10pm.