ZEN PSYCHOSIS: ANATOMY OF A DREAM, at the Ronald H. Silverman Fine Arts Gallery, opens Saturday, the 4th of November. The exhibition features photography, film, object sculpture, and literature based on the 2020 novel, Zen Psychosis. A surrealist narrative investigating the language, power, and truth of dreams first told in oneiric words by Shana Nys Dambrot and pinhole images by Osceola Refetoff, Anatomy of a Dream expands the project to include multi-sensory, participatory, and experiential dimensions.

Osceola Refetoff's images are produced using film, digital, infrared, and pinhole exposures, according to what best expresses the character of his subjects. Despite his documentarian impulses and images deliberately depicting ordinary, even mundane subjects, he trains on them a hyper-realistic and nuanced vision, often yielding surreal, even dreamlike images. His process typically happens "in camera," at the moment of capture, in a kind of alchemical reaction that transforms the external world into something both unchanged and extraordinary, realistic and magical. Refetoff's environmental photojournalism is regularly featured on PBS SoCal's multi-Emmy-winning Artbound, and in The Guardian, The New York Times, and The New Republic, earning Los Angeles Press Club awards for Best Feature Photo (2019, 2023), Photo Essay (2018, 2019, 2020), and Photojournalist of the Year (2018). The desert window series It's a Mess Without You is the British Journal of Photography's OpenWalls Arles 2020 Outstanding Series Winner. Recently returned from an artist residency in Svalbard, near the North Pole, his recent residency at Building Bridges investigated global sea level change in collaboration with Dr. Eric Larour, supervisor of NASA's Sea Level and Ice Group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Shana Nys Dambrot is a renowned Los Angeles art critic, curator, and author. She is the Arts Editor for the L.A. Weekly, and a contributor to Flaunt, Artillery, and other culture publications. She curates and juries exhibitions, writes prolifically for exhibition catalogs and monographic publications, and speaks nationally at galleries, schools, and cultural institutions. She received the 2022 Mozaik Future Art Writers Prize, the 2022 Rabkin Prize for Art Criticism, and the LA Press Club National Arts & 2022 Entertainment Journalism Critic of the Year award.
 
Mika M. Cho, Curator and Director, Ronald H. Silverman Fine Arts Gallery

Exhibition Dates l NOVEMBER 4 – NOVEMBER 16, 2023
Exhibition Reception l NOVEMBER 4, 2023 l SATURDAY, 4 – 6 PM
Closing Reception and Book Signing l NOVEMBER 14, 2023 l TUESDAY, 6 - 8 PM