DC Moore Gallery is pleased to present Claire Sherman: Petrichor. In this exhibition of large-scale landscapes, Claire Sherman explores the desert as a site of dramatic juxtaposition. Complicating the imagery associated with grand, sublime landscapes of the American West, Sherman focuses on subjects that exist at the periphery of our attention, distorting scale and perspective to draw us into new spaces.

In Sherman’s paintings of rocky canyons, waterfalls, crevices, and desert flora, spaces enclose and unravel around the viewer. Light pours through narrow gaps in these imposing edifices, suggesting a path through. Sherman visualizes the oppositions inherent to the desert, of extreme heat contrasted to the evidence of water, manifested in spaces carved out by the force of water and the growth of wildflowers and sagebrush.

The exhibition’s title, Petrichor, refers to a sweet smell that arrives in the desert after it rains, released from the dry soil. Sherman relates the scent of petrichor to anticipation, heralding a storm as well as signaling to animals to follow the scent to water. Sherman’s paintings present this multivalent phenomenon as akin to the sublime, something alluring that can also portend danger.

The works in the exhibition are informed by the artist’s own experiences hiking several American deserts over many seasons. The locations vary widely, appearing at once particular and ubiquitous. The anonymity of place allows the paintings to open up psychological spaces, becoming their own locations. Sherman’s gestural brushwork, painted wet-on-wet, creates dense tangles of undergrowth, geological strata, and thunderous waterfalls. Shifting between abstraction and representation, Sherman captures a moment between movement and stasis, suspending the viewer in the unsettled rhythms of the natural world.