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.
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PELLE CASS, HAWKS FROM UNDER. 2015
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PELLE CASS, HAM POLO CLUB, 2018
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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.
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Pelle Cass, Futures From Baseline court 6, Thursday, 2018
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Pelle Cass, Dartmouth Football Scrimmage, 2019
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ALSO AVAILABLE
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Pelle Cass, Dartmouth Basketball
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Pelle Cass, Atlanta Hawks
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Pelle Cass, Water Polo Match, Harvard
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Pelle Cass, Football Game from End Zone, Harvard
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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.
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