JACKSON HOLE, WYOMING – MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY is pleased to present Under the Sky, a solo exhibition with artists Doug and Mike Starn, on view at the gallery's downtown location from December 19th, 2025 through February 8th, 2026. An opening reception will be held Friday, December 19th from 5 to 7pm. All are welcome to attend.
Long celebrated for expanding the material and conceptual possibilities of photography, Doug and Mike Starn turn their gaze upward in Under the Sky, treating the sky not as backdrop but as principal. Contending with the contradictions of contemporary life through images of clouds – ubiquitous forms we see daily, yet rarely stop to consider – the Starns bring the sky into the foreground, using it to frame questions about the lived realities beneath it.
The sky is humbling in its scale, omnipresent, and endlessly varied. To photograph it feels almost absurd, the Starns admit, precisely because it is always there. Yet the simple joy of looking – the “ocular pleasure” of witnessing its color, light, and atmospheric change – takes on unusual resonance. The sky offers beauty, but also distance; it remains indifferent to the brutality enacted beneath it. “The innocent and natural world, the sky overhead, which is there anytime you’d like to notice, stands in direct opposition to the willful hate and oppression we know is below it,” they write.
Grounded in photography, the Starns’ process is time-consuming and meticulous, yet intentionally imperfect. Printed on hand-coated gelatin papers using water-soluble inks, the images refuse to behave predictably. Wheat paste, which is also water-based, is used to assemble the works, often causing the ink to temporarily dissolve or misregister. Instead of correcting these disruptions, the Starns invite and embrace them, painting over the marks in a contemporary form of “spotting,” a nod to their early photography training in the 1970s. “Life isn’t perfect,” they write. “Problems and mistakes are part of everyday reality. Our work doesn’t hide the problems – it highlights the attempts to deal with them.”
Once sealed beneath layers of varnish and wax, the surfaces take on an atmospheric depth, as though weathered by time or touched by shifting air. Curved works, both concave and convex and supported by welded armatures, intensify this effect: light pools, bends, and slips across their surfaces, making each viewing contingent on movement and illumination. Flat works hover between photograph and object, revealed gradually as illumination shifts. Each piece becomes a site where stillness confronts turbulence, which is echoed in their titles, such as anybody sweet and good and kind in the world, view of a bombed residential building, it's a beautiful day, bullet holes in the cemetery wall, be a friend to the weak and love justice, people searching a building after an airstrike, and just give me some truth. Beauty and brutality exist side by side, as they do in life.
In a moment defined by darkness the Starns look up. They ask us to do the same, not as an escape, but as a reflection. The sky, indifferent yet inspiring, becomes a place to measure ourselves: who we are, what we inflict, what we cherish, and what we might still make possible. Through their material choices, their embrace of accident, and their willingness to hold contradiction without resolving it, the Starns present a body of work that feels as vulnerable and resilient as the world it reflects.
Doug and Mike Starn were represented by Leo Castelli from 1989 until his death in 1999. Their art has been the object of numerous solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries worldwide. The Starns have received many honors including two National Endowment for the Arts Grants in 1987 and 1995; The International Center for Photography’s Infinity Award for Fine Art Photography in 1992; and, artists in residency at NASA in the mid-nineties. They have received critical acclaim in The New York Times, Dagens Nyheter, Corriere della Sera, Le Figaro, The Times (London), Art in America, and Artforum, amongst many other notable media. Major artworks by the Starns are represented in public and private collections including: The Museum of Modern Art (NY); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, (NY); The Jewish Museum, (NY); The Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY); Moderna Museet (Stockholm); The National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne); Whitney Museum of American Art (NY); Yokohama Museum of Art (Japan); La Bibliotèque Nationale (Paris); La Maison Européenne de la Photographie (Paris); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), amongst many others. They live and work in Beacon, New York.
