Scenes and Images
August 8 - September 19, 2025 SUN VALLEY, IDAHO
OCHI is pleased to present Scenes and Images, an exhibition of new works by New York-based artist Benjamin Langford. This marks Langford’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Scenes and Images will be on view at OCHI, located at 119 Lewis Street in Ketchum, Idaho from August 8 through September 19, 2025.
In Scenes and Images, Langford presents a body of work that hybridizes painting and photography to explore the idea of nature after the death of nature. The artist’s photographs–from dioramas and zoos to arboretums and butterfly pavilions–serve as the basis for the paintings on view. Reflecting on constructed environments shaped by our idealized projections, Langford reveals vestigial fantasies of the natural world.
In his analytic and anthropologically-charged landscapes, Langford references the romanticism of the Hudson River School and the soft-focus mystique of pictorialist photography. In works like Twilight (2024), the grand pastoral view recedes like a theatrical backdrop, while tangled branches overtake the foreground – a reversal of the classic frontier gaze, where the sublime is now elusive, distant, and inaccessible. Utilizing photographs, printed on canvas to serve as underpaintings, Langford paints into the landscapes, muddying the fidelity of these idyll worlds.
Beneath the beauty of these constructions lies a quiet mourning—for the loss of unfiltered connection and the erosion of awe in a world increasingly flattened by mediation. Yet the works resist cynicism, seeking to re-enchant, to reclaim feeling even within the artificial. They suggest that even illusions can offer moments of truth—and that wonder, though transformed, is still within reach.