Nina Johnson is please to announce A Different Regard for Life, Adraint Bereal’s debut solo show with the gallery, which is a cure for absence. “The last six years of my life have been filled with grief. No one teaches you how to deal with the lingering. I take pictures to cope with the absence of that which I see and don’t see.” The collection of work includes pictures from his past and present, life and his work. Wrapped up in a cycle of birth, death, and rebirth are a cocktail of vignettes from his multi-year body of work, The Black Yearbook, Astroworld, his nephew’s birth, and the funeral rites of a beloved Aunt named Kecha.
They all come together to form a landscape–a South whose subtleties are far cry from the cowboy cartoons. This horizon line stitches a new Southern becoming. Bereal depicts a South where a different regard for life pervades. Life is precious because death is always lingering and acknowledged. It joins us for every moment of quiet we assume we’re alone. Bereal is assembling a counter narrative to the South we see propped up by commercial image makers, barren lands and straw houses no more. “I’m from an infamous town in Texas that people have ventriloquized like much of the South for many years. It’s deserving of a grander perspective.”
Arriving somewhere between the auto fictional work of his mentor and friend Wolfgang Tillmans and the research driven approach of Dawoud Bey, Bereal’s work situates in dialogue to the generations that come before. Bereal is truing the South, where these images were made, as the loving, raging, and sick place he knows it to be. He is interested in how photography has the power to memorialize, build, explore, and maybe even cure the living.
A Different Regard for Life will be on view through October 19th.
