Pelle Cass: Crowded Fields

11 SEP - 30 OCT 2021

Foto Relevance is thrilled to announce Pelle Cass for Crowded Fields, a solo exhibition featuring selections from a critically acclaimed, ongoing series of work capturing hours of dynamic action in a single still frame. A bacchanal of bodies in motion fills each field of play and contrasts with the rules of organized sports. The order and disorder of his frenzied time-lapses allow the viewer to experience the whole event within a single instant, altering how time is perceived.

 

VIEW EXHIBITION CATALOG

Download press release

  •
  • FROM THE ARTIST: I am compelled to make a certain kind of composition: a vast field of human figures, twisting...
    PELLE CASS, HAWKS FROM UNDER. 2015

    FROM THE ARTIST:

    I am compelled to make a certain kind of composition: a vast field of human figures, twisting and swarming, everything happening everywhere at once. I think of floating and flying in space--literal as a high diver and as allusive as the dizzying, disorienting abstract compositions of a Modernist like Malevich.

  • Underneath these formal and emotional qualities, lurks the eerie, invisible passage of time. I’ve always been dissatisfied with the limitations...
    PELLE CASS, HAM POLO CLUB, 2018

    Underneath these formal and emotional qualities, lurks the eerie, invisible passage of time. I’ve always been dissatisfied with the limitations of a single still photograph. I want to compress so much into a photograph that it reflects the richness of the world; meanwhile, I stay true to the immense descriptive power of photography and its incontrovertible sense of realism.


    Pelle Cass

  • The images in Crowded Fields transform viewers in the gallery into spectators on the sidelines and in the bleachers. The artist acts as a proxy, attending various college sporting events and capturing not just one moment to show to us, but hundreds. Setting up his tripod, Cass takes up to a thousand images of each match, game, meet, or race, and carefully stitches together bodies and balls in motion to engineer the perfect balance of chaos and composition. The artist refers to the final product as "a kind of a still time-lapse" where nothing is altered, just selectively combined and omitted. Quarters blend together, tops and bottoms of innings are topsy-turvy, and overtime is indistinguishable from the rest. 

     

    Cass is attuned to the disorientation that team sports can inspire. As written by Laura Bannister for Artsy, "In these Whereʼs Waldo–esque spectacles, every player resembles the next. Balls are always in flight. Actions are hyper-compressed in a way that renders individual players obsolete—something Cass sees as “truer to memory”—creating a kind of chaotic visual symphony" (8 Contemporary Artists Taking Fresh Approaches to Sports, 2021).

     

    Through these carefully crafted snapshots, Cass conveys a "sense of play, the eeriness of time, and a feeling of Dionysian chaos." The emotions of each moment of play are not lost in the reshuffling, but rather amplified by the frenzy. Experience hours in moments, movement as stillness, and be transported courtside within the gallery walls. 

  • Pelle Cass, Futures From Baseline court 6, Thursday, 2018
    Pelle Cass, Futures From Baseline court 6, Thursday, 2018
  • In Cass’ photographs, sequentiality and ground have become detached. His subjects fly off in all directions, competing for space. The...
    Pelle Cass, Dartmouth Football Scrimmage, 2019

    In Cass’ photographs, sequentiality and ground have become detached. His subjects fly off in all directions, competing for space. The complex, crowded field of play in a Pelle Cass photograph can be tangled and confusing, as bodies in motion block other bodies, obscuring the action. It breaks the cardinal rule of sports photography, which aims to present clear, blink-of-an-eye moments that are instantly get-able and easy to grasp. 

     

    — A. S. Hamrah, "Fever Pitch: The Photographer Pelle Cass in Motion," SSENSE

  • (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).

  • ALSO AVAILABLE

  • ABOUT THE ARTIST

     

    Pelle Cass  (American, b. 1954) is a photographer from Brookline, Massachusetts. He has exhibited at the George Eastman House, the Albright Knox Gallery, the New Mexico Museum of Art, and the Metamorf Biennial for Art and Technology in Norway and has presented shows at the Abigail Ogilvy Gallery (Boston), Stux Gallery (Boston), Gallery Kayafas (Boston), and the Houston Center for Photography. His work is owned by the Fogg Art Museum, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Polaroid Collection, the DeCordova Museum, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the MFA, Houston. Cassʼs photos have appeared in books such as Photoviz (Gestalten), Deleueze and the City (Edinburgh University Press), Langfordʼs Basic Photography (Focal Press), The Beautiful Sparkle: Optical Illusions in Art (Prestel), and in magazines such as Beaux Arts (France), McSweeneyʼs, FOAM, GQ, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Atlantic, and many others. He has received fellowships from Yaddo, Artists Resource Trust, and the Polaroid Collection.