Jan Schlegel
Gilman Contemporary welcomes German photographer Jan Schlegel. Schlegel’s black-and-white images capture the profound beauty and delicate fragility of life. Known for captivating portraits and still-lifes, Schlegel’s work reveals the bare essence of his subjects. Whether it is a portrait of a person, jellyfish, or tulip, each image is filled with a tender and quiet intimacy.
Schlegel uses traditional photographic printing methods to create images that withstand the test of time. Each hand-toned and printed platinum print is a meditation in stillness, craft, and artistic vision. The series Of Aliens, Mermaids and Medusas features portraits of backlit jellyfish undulating against rich and inky black. These ethereal images offer brief moments of fantasy, inviting a sense of wonder at the natural world. Through his lens, the world is infused with magic, inviting us to see not only what we expect, but what we dare to envision.
At the heart of Schlegel’s work is a call to reawaken the imagination. In an era defined by such crises as climate change, pollution, pandemic, and war, our senses are dulled, and our creative instincts overwhelmed by anxiety and noise. Schlegel believes imagination is not a luxury but a lifeline, one that asks us to slow down, turn inward, and reconnect with the world around us. This kind of imagination is not an escape from reality, but a deeper engagement with it, where creativity becomes a path to new perspectives and meaningful change. Each image is not only a visual meditation but also a tactile experience, with every print carefully developed by Schlegel to ensure its quiet, enduring impact.
Maggie Taylor
Gilman Contemporary is delighted to announce representation of photographic artist Maggie Taylor. An early adopter of technology as an artistic tool, Taylor’s layered visual narratives blend the aesthetics of 19th-century hand-colored photography with elements of fantasy and the subconscious. These compositions are visually arresting and psychologically resonant. Evoking the surrealism of Magritte and Dali, the work is distinctly her own—intuitive, mysterious, and deeply imaginative. Her images, filled with seashells, random objects, antique toys, and anonymous figures, encourage viewers to bring their own perspectives and interpretations to the work, recognizing that meaning is shaped as much by individual experience as by the artist’s intent.
“There is no one meaning for any of the images,” she notes, “rather, they exist as a kind of visual riddle… meant to be both playful and provocative.” Inspired by childhood memories, science fiction, and a curiosity about human nature, Taylor creates spaces that feel both intimate and otherworldly, inviting the viewer to linger, reflect, and dream.
Dana Hart-Stone
Dana Hart-Stone’s digital paintings are rooted in a deep engagement with the historical and cultural fabric of the American West. His early experiences exploring abandoned homesteads in Eastern Montana fostered a fascination with the fragmented narratives of settler life and the broader, often obscured, histories of the American frontier. These solitary encounters, wandering through collapsed roofs, overturned stoves, and dust-covered remnants of domestic life, left a lasting impression. They offered glimpses into lives interrupted; incomplete stories suspended in place. Today, those formative discoveries continue to inform his work, expressed through meticulously composed digital paintings constructed from vintage vernacular photographs.
Hart-Stone’s large-scale compositions serve as visual archives dense with symbolic and documentary resonance. Seen from afar, his works read as woven tapestries or Native American star quilts, unified by rhythm, texture, and repetition. Yet as viewers draw closer, intimate narratives begin to unfold with striking clarity: a man proudly displaying his catch of the day, a child perched beside a rooster, a woman grinning behind the wheel of a vintage car. Hart-Stone is particularly attuned to recurring visual codes, such as how Americans pose in a rowboat, straddle a horse, or stand beside a car. These seemingly ordinary moments accumulate into something more, a collective portrait of American life reframed through the lens of memory, context, and perspective. By recontextualizing vernacular imagery, Hart-Stone investigates the deeper structures of cultural memory, how personal and national narratives are formed, preserved, reinterpreted, and forgotten.
Captions:
Box Jellyfish #1, (Carybdea Branchi), Cape Town
by Jan Schlegel
platinum print
size and edition vary
The Patient Traveler
by Maggie Taylor
archival pigment print
size and edition vary
Workhorse
by Dana Hart-Stone
UV-cured acrylic ink on canvas
60” x 48”
661 Sun Valley Road | Ketchum
208.726.7585
gilmancontemporary.com
