If a butterfly ever saw an owl features work from several interconnected series, including The anonymous shapes of words, I want to believe sea cucumbers are happy, and Is the eye I am seen as is the eye I see myself through. Each navigates the limits of photographic representation through formal experimentation in abstraction, objecthood, appearance, and symbolic systems. While being philosophical and literary inquiries, the works remain grounded in photographic materials and processes.

Past series by the artist have reflected on two central themes: cameras as language machines and architecture, both modern and ancient. The works’ formal and material presence have a matter-of-fact quality, highlighting the camera’s language of representation as the medium through which it communicates. The work presents the illusion of representation with an ever-present awareness of its construction and limitation, making the language through which the picture speaks central to the works.

Assaf Evron (b. 1977, Israel) is an artist and educator based in Chicago. He received a BA from Tel Aviv University in 2007, and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013 in Photography. He continued his education with a MA in 2017 from The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel-Aviv University. Evron’s work investigates the nature of vision and the ways in which it is reflected in socially constructed structures, where he applies photographic thinking to two and three-dimensional media. Collapsing the relationship between culture and nature, his work takes a critical eye on language, experience, and geology with a sense of loss and melancholy emanating from the Anthropocene. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums internationally including The Museum for Contemporary Art in Chicago, Crystal Bridges Museum for American Art and The Israel Museum in Jerusalem among others.