Gallery Vriend van Bavink is proud to present ‘The Evening Pink’ by visual artist and storyteller Ethan Rafal (US, 1983). The exhibition shows a selection of special prints from the series ‘The Evening Pink’ and celebrates the announcement of the eponymous artist’s book that Rafal will self-publish later in 2019.

‘The Evening Pink’ is a Psychedelic (Anti-)Western shot at the twilight of climate fallout. Rafal created the photo series in landscapes severely affected by drought, fires and flooding amid the disruption of seasons and ecologies. In a conscious revisiting of the genre of the Western, the project recasts climate change as the looming violence on the Western frontier of the United States. In ‘The Evening Pink’ concept images from dreams and nightmares meet the real world. Neither strictly cinematic nor documentary, it is rather a documentation of performances carried out in the world. Through chance encounter, the Western genre has become a means to examine the American Mythology as it functions in everyday life.

Rafal produces his work in a materials-driven process. Climatic processes become part of the image from film capture to print. 4×5” and 8×10” films have been exposed to rain, hail and harsh light, or are otherwise affected by the decay of the canvas and wooden view camera. Rafal often shoots after dark so that the film grain reveals a proclivity toward red. Particularly the deep shadows reveal an organized and organic feedback. After film capture, images are rendered through pigment transfer printing. A blend of printmaking and analog photographic processes, Rafal creates pigment-based negatives/positives before transferring them using his own chemistry. Therefore, no image can ever be exactly reproduced. 

Ethan Rafal is an artist and photographer based in San Francisco and Oslo. He has toured extensively in Europe and the United States with his previous photo series and artist’s book ‘Shock and Awe’, a twelve-year autobiographical project examining the relationships between prolonged war and homeland decay. ‘The Evening Pink’ marks his first solo exhibition in The Netherlands.