There’s a story both universal and uniquely revealing threading its way through Los Angeles-based photographer Zoë Ghertner’s Held in the Palm. An intimacy is established with the subject of Ghertner’s gaze as it becomes a beloved object whose mannerisms and intricacies can be known in a manner that is both intuitive and recurrent. Ghertner draws in close to her subjects as though transfixed. She allows the viewer to commune with the minutiae and abstract elements comprising the whole of each thing—to be engulfed by it. This immersive sensation is repeated across each image to achieve an exact, heightened feeling that the artist plays with across different forms.

Ghertner dutifully maintains a level of intensity with all of her subjects, exploring and releasing their associative experiential qualities within the still image. With such a meticulous focus, rippling patterns or grainy textures become revealed in places where these qualities might otherwise go overlooked. Using color, texture, and light, Ghertner emphasizes the formal properties of her medium and exploits its immediacy. In some photographs, the artist toys with her compositions to soften and distort the final image—imparting a hazy, gooey, or warming sensation upon the viewer of the finished work. In these final photographs, time is ultimately suspended as each subject becomes an abstraction.

Interconnection is also a key theme within Held in the Palm. To accompany the exhibition, Ghertner invited artist Nora Slade to contribute a piece of writing. The hand-written pages of Slade's poem, titled Honeycomb, sit on top of a table featuring a constellation-style collection of photos displayed as a single work. A string of carefully selected words followed by mirroring sentence structures invite the viewer to make connections—the fleshy pink tones, pronounced shadows, and mesmerizing textures of Ghertner’s photographs resound and amplify one another. 
Holding a focus upon her subjects that is both selective and punctilious throughout Held in the Palm, Ghertner locks in on and amplifies the beauty and sensuality present in that which is fleeting. A buzz of anticipation, for instance, pulses out from a wave that has been frozen in the act of either crashing forward toward the camera’s eye or cowering back into the sea. Ghertner’s style and eye bind these moments, awakening the viewer to new forms of familiarity and relationships to the world around them.