Jo Whaley: Echoes

The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum invited Jo Whaley to install her still life color photographs among Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings to open a new perspective on the legacy of constructing modernist compositions. Combining techniques of painting and theater, Whaley suspends time and reason in a dramatic process of crafting photographs in her studio. The two artists share a love for brilliant saturated color and bold uncanny compositions that evoke the natural world. Similarly, their vocabularies of abstract forms challenge viewers to rethink the familiar, recalibrate gravity and the scale of the known universe. Yet, separated by decades of environmental and technological change, important differences emerge in this installation of comparisons that reveals a shifting vision of nature expressed in the specific world of each artist. Whaley’s twenty-first century photographic compositions express the decay and threat to a fragile environment unanticipated by the innocence of O’Keeffe’s radiant tributes to the transcendence of nature.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.