Elemental Forms / Broken Earth
- This Cafe Life
- Dec 1
- 3 min read
Photography, Process & The Soul of a Changing Landscape
Chazan Gallery at Wheeler | Nov. 20 – Dec. 13
There are exhibitions you view, and then there are exhibitions you enter. Elemental Forms / Broken Earth is the latter — a three-artist conversation on fragility, transformation, and the threads connecting land, water, and time. Featuring the works of BC Crane, Denny Moers, and Jonathan Sharlin, this winter exhibition at the Chazan Gallery at Wheeler is more than an art show — it is a meditation on process, on elemental movement, and on what remains when the world shifts underneath us.
The work invites you to stand still, to look longer, and to feel the pulse of a landscape under stress, yet still full of beauty.
Photography as Alchemy — Then, Now, Always
Crane and Moers position their collaboration around process — analog and digital speaking to one another like tidal pull and return. They describe their approach as “making visible the invisible,” and that intention lives clearly in the work.
BC Crane — Water, Light, & Digital Translation
Crane’s pieces move like water itself — fluid, ambiguous, shimmering between recognition and abstraction. With training through Rhode Island School of Design, Harvard, and SVA, her images feel like memory — layered, refracted, reverent. Her work moves. It bends and dissolves shape. It feels like the moment just before something disappears. Crane has exhibited widely — Newport Art Museum, Mystic Museum of Art, Houston FotoFest, and other national fairs. She is a photographic observer of humanity as well as environment — from Lourdes pilgrimages to India’s Mela rivers — her lens is always tuned to ritual, time, and the seen/unseen.
Denny Moers — Trees as Architecture of Memory
Where Crane dissolves, Moers reveals.
Moers’ monoprints — alchemical, deeply tonal — are built not with ink but with light itself. He manipulates exposure, chemistry, and shadow to uncover the interior life of trees. These are not botanical portraits — they are skeletons, memory structures, internal systems laid bare. Moers has photographed frescoes, tombs, coastlines, and construction scars across the world. His monoprints live in major collections — LACMA, Bibliothèque Nationale, SFMOMA, Yale, Baltimore Museum of Art — and his work remains one of the most experimental bridges between photography and printmaking today.
Together, Crane and Moers form a single conversation —water that shapes land; trees that root it.
Jonathan Sharlin — Broken Earth / A Changed Planet
If Crane is movement and Moers is interior, Sharlin is aftermath.
His series "Broken Earth" sits at the intersection of beauty and rupture — landscapes shifting faster than history is prepared to understand. This is not scenery; this is warning. Coastlines break, glaciers liquify, fires erase, water levels rise.
Sharlin writes:
“Even casual observations cannot ignore our changing landscapes...At its heart is the contradiction of aestheticizing a place of battered beauty.”
His work asks:
Can we look without turning away?
Can beauty remain while acknowledging damage?
Is repair still possible?
Rooted in Tikkun Olam — the Jewish principle of world-repair — his imagery holds tension: devastation, yet hope. Brokenness, yet responsibility. His career spans 50 years, 10+ arts grants, installations, books, RISD faculty, and collections from Fogg Museum to MFA Houston. This is environmental art not as politics, but as moral weight.
Why This Exhibition Matters
Because we live in an era where climate is no longer theory — it is event.
Because photography is no longer one thing —i t is process, combination, evolution.
Because the earth — water, trees, soil — is shifting too quickly for history yet too slowly for urgency.
This exhibition sits inside that tension.
Crane = water, transformation, ephemeral motion
Moers = rooted form, chemical revelation, internal structure
Sharlin = fracture, climate acceleration, the possibility of repair
Three voices. One planet. One shared question:
How do we care for what we cannot keep?
If You Go
Chazan Gallery at Wheeler
Providence, Rhode Island
November 20 – December 13 (extended), 2025
Artists: BC Crane, Denny Moers, Jonathan Sharlin
A recommended viewing pace: Stand. Slow down.
Take each work the way you would take a breath.
You may not leave with answers — but you will leave changed.
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