NEW YORK, NY.- The Hermès Foundation supports Sharon Harper: From Above and Below at the Gallery at Hermès, the second of two exhibitions to be shown at the gallery in 2014.

Sharon Harper—who counts the moon, stars and sun as her subjects—is fascinated by traces and impressions, both made during the photographic process and on our collective consciousness. Her work explores the intersection of technology and perception. The Gallery at Hermès presents 11 large-scale works produced between 2003 and 2010.

Three distinct, but inextricably linked series present the viewer with images they could not see without the camera. Some photographs are created over a period of days, weeks and, in some cases, months on a single sheet of film inserted and reinserted into her large format camera.

These exposures culminate in an image that depicts the cycles of the moon, along with any other chance interference that might occur. Others capture long exposures of the stars; time is marked by the length of the ‘scratch’ on the film. And yet another series employs a telescope rigged up to a digital camera.

Confounding our expectations of time and space, Harper gravitates toward experimentation: she does not know exactly what the final image will look like when she is making it. Her works lives at the convergence of photography’s technical capabilities and its poetic, even sublime, potential.

The exhibition at the Gallery at Hermès is curated by Cory Jacobs.

Running simultaneously, Harper mounted an exhibition of different work titled Sharon Harper: Shifting Views at Rick Wester Fine Art in Chelsea from September 19 through November 1, 2014. The gallery is located at 526 West 26th Street, New York, NY.

In addition, Harper was a 2013 recipient of one of the most coveted fellowships in photography from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The Foundation has awarded annual fellowships to a diverse group of scholars, artists, and scientists for ninety years. Past winners in the field of photography include Diane Arbus, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, Cindy Sherman and Garry Winogrand.

Sharon Harper is just beginning her fellowship and will travel to produce work through the 2014- 2015 academic year. She is responding to the history of land uses of protected parklands in the United States, and to the technological advances that arise within these inspired places.

Sharon Harper received an MFA in photography and related media from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her work is in permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston among others. She has received and attended numerous artist residency fellowships including Yaddo in New York; the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire; the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming; and the Leighton Residencies at the Banff Centre in Canada. She has exhibited extensively domestically and internationally, mounting solo exhibitions in New York City, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Cologne and Madrid among many others. She is currently a Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. www.sharonharper.org