Gordon Robichaux is pleased to present Electrograms 1978–2020, an exhibition of photographs by Kerry Schuss. Long celebrated for his namesake gallery and singular program exhibiting visionary and contemporary art, this exhibition is Schuss’s first solo show of his own work.

The exhibit includes a series of black-and-white digital photographs printed on traditional silver gelatin fiber paper from negatives Schuss created between 1978 and 1979 in his loft on Park Avenue South above Max’s Kansas City, blocks away from Gordon Robichaux. The original 4x5 and 8x10 negatives were made using a technique called Kirlian photography, which employs high-voltage current to directly expose film in the darkroom without the use of a camera. With the aid of a Tesla coil to produce high-voltage, low-current electricity, Schuss used his own body, fingertips, and objects—pieces of found metal, mirrors—to complete a circuit between the power source and the film, creating visually complex, reflexive images, both bodily and otherworldly.

From 1976 to 1981, while living in the loft on Park Avenue South, Schuss made hundreds of prints, negatives, and transparencies, all of which he kept in storage for thirty-five years. He continued to work seriously as an artist creating work in various mediums—painting, color photography, bronze, printmaking, and installation—until 1998 when he opened his gallery. “The gallery became my main creative outlet; without intending it, I took a twenty-year hiatus from making my own work.” Inspired by his friend and peer Mitchell Algus, who organized an exhibition of 1970s conceptual photography in 2016, Schuss returned to his stored pieces and discovered the strength and possibilities of the work he started over forty years ago:

A distinctive quality of the medium of photography is that prints can be made many years after a negative is created. Using digital scanning and printing processes that weren’t available at the time the negatives were made, I can now produce larger prints with the sharpness of the original negatives, opening up the images and revealing new visual information that was previously hidden.

Over the past three years I’ve been printing these images created by my twenty-five-year-old self and coming to understand them as gifts, which I couldn’t fully comprehend when I made them. The compositions have the freedom and experimentation that someone feels in their twenties. I now realize how fortunate artists are who can look back at their earlier work when they’re older, and see how things evolve and add up. What was once a dead end or failure makes more sense with the perspective of time.