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if a butterfly ever saw an owl
Presenting Assaf Evron at OSMOS in NYC
Hours for Opening Weekend (October 25-27th):
Saturday 12-6PM, Opening 6-8PM
Sunday 12-6PM
Monday 12-6PM
Exhibition then resumes regular OSMOS hours:
Thursday-Saturday, 12-6PM
50 E 1st Street, NYC
ro art services is delighted to announce a solo exhibition of Assaf Evron. Taking place at OSMOS, “if a butterfly ever saw an owl” features work from several interconnected series, including Evron’s “The Anonymous Shapes of Words,” “I Want to Believe Sea Cucumbers Are Happy,” and “Is the Eye I Am Seen As Is the Eye I See Myself Through.” Each navigates the limits of photographic representation through formal experimentation in abstraction, objecthood, appearance, and symbolic systems. While being philosophical and literary inquiries, the works remain grounded in photographic materials and processes.
Assaf Evron's "Untitled," 2024, archival print on metallic rag with artist-cut mat, 20.25 x 24.25 in, welded aluminum frame with Optimum glazing.
Past series by the artist have reflected on two central themes: cameras as language machines, and architecture, both modern and ancient. The works’ formal and material presence have a matter-of-fact quality, highlighting the camera’s language of representation as the medium through which it communicates. The work presents the illusion of representation with an ever-present awareness of its construction and limitation, making the language through which the picture speaks central to the works.
One of Evron’s preceding bodies of work had centered on a temple, and the quarry in Jerusalem from which the stones had been carved. The works in “if a butterfly ever saw an owl” began when he transitioned from the man-made void of an ancient quarry, to the pre-historic voids of natural caverns. Titled “The Anonymous Shapes of Words,” the series began when his spelunking throughout the Midwest became portraits of the American landscape through its interior forms. A subject carved by millions of years of geological activity, they not only exist on a scale far-longer than human history, but have also formed some of the oldest exhibition spaces for human art. The series is printed on metallic paper, a material reminiscent of cave walls, with artist-shaped mats, whose geometric form and framed voids evoke the architecture by humankind. The images present cryptic depictions of gravity and form, a space where culture, nature, and legibility collapse into abstraction.
Assaf Evron's I Want to Believe Sea Cucumbers are Happy (GOPR4964.JPG), 2023, 5 x 7 in. digital silver gelatin print, 11 x 14 in aluminum frame with Optimum acrylic glazing
The second series, “I Want to Believe Sea Cucumbers Are Happy,” was captured during dives in the Red Sea, where Evron used a GoPro along with an assortment of other cameras while scuba diving. An intimate series of sea cucumbers in their natural habitat, the portraits capture a creature who lives in an environment without gravity, but whose life is rooted to the sandy floor. Ancient worms passing the raw materials of their environment through their bodies, the sand-eating beings filter through space as creatures of cavernous nature and form.
While the first two series reflect each other, the third series mirrors unto itself. The focus of “Is the Eye I Am Seen As Is the Eye I See Myself Through” gives inspiration to the exhibition’s title, where photographs find the confusing forms of birds and butterflies in a conservatory. Composing their pictures with extreme focal or value ranges, the pictures play off what-we-know to be true, and what-we-see them to look like. The butterfly’s camouflage is both a visual language of survival, and a metaphor for the photograph itself; images whose language exists as a reference to an other, and altogether dissimilar, thing. The butterfly wears images of its possible predator, who sees only itself when gazing upon its would-be prey. Used in a manner to capture visual discomposure, the camera plays a speculative role lying between perception, self-recognition, and mimicry. Finding beauty in a language of misrepresentation, the work reveals the nature of the medium through which it speaks.
-ro
From Is the Eye I Am Seen As Is the Eye I See Myself Through, 2025, printed on archival rag, framed with welded aluminum and optimum acrylic glazing, 13.25 x 16.75 x 1 in.
Assaf Evron (b. 1977, Israel) is an artist and educator based in Chicago. He received a BA from Tel Aviv University in 2007, and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013 in Photography. He continued his education with a MA in 2017 from The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel-Aviv University. Evron’s work investigates the nature of vision and the ways in which it is reflected in socially constructed structures, where he applies photographic thinking to two and three-dimensional media. Collapsing the relationship between culture and nature, his work takes a critical eye on language, experience, and geology with a sense of loss and melancholy emanating from the Anthropocene. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums internationally including The Museum for Contemporary Art in Chicago, Crystal Bridges Museum for American Art and The Israel Museum in Jerusalem among others. Recent Solo and Two-Person exhibitions include David Slain Creative (Chicago), Arts Club of Chicago (Chicago), S.R. Crow Hall (Chicago), Center for Digital Art (Holon), MCA (Chicago), Elmhurst Art Museum (Illinois), Neubauer Collegium (Chicago), Chicago Architecture Biennial (Chicago), Andrew Rafacz Gallery (Chicago), Haifa Museum for Art (Haifa), Habres + Partner Galerie (Vienna), and The Heder Contemporary Art (Tel Aviv). Selected Group Exhibitions include Gwangju Biennial (South Korea), Julius Caesar (Chicago), Fosdick-Nelson Gallery (NY), Chicago Manual of Style (Chicago), Crystal Bridges Museum for American Art (Arkansas).
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