Schlechtriem Brothers Berlin is pleased to present a show of new photographs by the New York based artist David Benjamin Sherry. For his first Berlin solo show entitled “Sensate Transcendency”, David Benjamin Sherry uses traditional color processes and strictly analog darkroom manipulations to capture the breath-taking majesty of American National Parks such as Death Valley, Yosemite and the Olympic Quinault Rain Forest (to name a few). These photographs, all taken over the course of a month long road trip in the Pacific Northwest, were then internalized and reconstructed in the controlled environment of his studio. Thus, the resulted images form the backdrop and mise en scène for a cast of Arcadian dwellers and wandering mystics with all the pomp and glitter of a James Bidgood set. The marriage of natural landscapes and controlled portraiture merge fact and fiction, depicting Sherry’s fantastical world. Sherry’s photo manipulations of panoramic landscapes call to mind the Hudson River School Painters, such as Frederic Church, in their depiction of the American landscape as a pastoral setting, where human beings and nature peacefully coexist. But where the Hudson River School painters saw the hand of God, Sherry sees the frontier of the occult, where the paranormal is the rule and there is no exception. The imperfections of his analog, darkroom and film manipulations are akin to a marriage of opposites – the precision of film vs. the frailty of human touch – the occult proposition of a naked man at peace with a magical nature. His total rejection of digital manipulation is a devotion to the classic romance of photography and implies the connection with the caring hand and the handmade creation. David Benjamin Sherry, born 1981 in Upstate New York, has exhibited work at Team Gallery, New York, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, China Art Objects, Los Angeles and has had a solo show at Galerie Lisa Ruyter, Vienna. Hiswork has been featured in magazines such as V-man, Dazed and Confused, I-D, He, Tokion, and Qvest. Sherry received his BFA Photography from RISD, Rhode Island, and his MFA Photography from the Yale School of Photography.