Eileen Neff: Moving Still
Locks Gallery, Philadelphia
November 16 - December 22, 2001
Locks Gallery presents a new series of photograph-based work by the Philadelphia artist and writer EILEEN NEFF. These fifteen images begin from the artist's photographs and combine several images that evoke both mysterious and playful landscapes.
Eileen Neff, well known for photographic installations at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Contemporary Philadelphia Artists, 1990) and ICA, Philadelphia (The Mountain, A Bed and A Chair, 1992) and as a critic and teacher, has most recently photographed interiors and the landscape as seen from the commuter train from Philadelphia to New York. This is her first exhibition at Locks Gallery and her largest solo exhibition since 1997.
Previously, Eileen Neff's photographs turned into actual objects, combining furniture or picture frames with landscapes or interiors. In these new works, the complex structures of the installation are embodied in the individual photographs. Working from a conceptual impulse to trigger memory or reflection, Neff's landscapes pose questions about presence and perception.
The seemingly natural landscapes are in fact constructions that allow Eileen Neff to question what is seen versus what is imagined. In this group of works, generated from her train photographs, movement and time seem to exist in different states within the same landscape.
EILEEN NEFF received a B.A. from Temple University, a B.F.A. from Philadelphia College of Art and an M.F.A. from Tyler School of Art. She has exhibited at P.S. 1 in Long Island City, New York; Artists Space, New York; The Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia; the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin; and the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia. She has received numerous awards and grants, including an NEA Photography Fellowship, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts and a Leeway Foundation Grant. Eileen Neff has been a regular contributor to Artforum since 1989 and has taught at Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania. Since 1981 she has been an instructor at the University of the Arts.
A full color catalogue with an essay by Dominique Nahas accompanies the exhibition.
LOCKS GALLERY
600 Washington Square South, Philadelphia PA 19106
