Candida Höfer, Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco

Candida Höfer

Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco

February 20 - March 22, 2003

Candida Höfer's photographs continue her careful cataloguing of public urban interiors. The absence of people in her pictures allows viewers to focus on the specifics of architecture, decorative and functional elements, furniture and other indicators of human engineering and aesthetic choice that reveal much about the absent choosers and users of the spaces. Besides the basic features of the rooms are the accidental relationships - amusing , surreal, ironic - that occur. Examples are the sad scene of a lone vase of flowers waving to a circle of chairs who appear to have turned their backs, and the rolling specimen tables unsure how to proceed in with a room full of similar tables lined up like soldiers.

Candida Höfer exhibits her work internationally and recently was included in Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany. A traveling survey show in the United States is currently being organized by the Norton Museum of Art and the California State University, Long Beach, University Art Museum.

RENA BRANSTEN GALLERY

77 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

www.renabranstengallery.com

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Architecture, MCA, Chicago

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Architecture

Museum of Contemporary art - MCA, Chicago

February 22 - June 2, 2003

Profoundly beautiful and powerfully evocative, the new body of work Architecture by internationally-acclaimed Japanese photographer HIROSHI SUGIMOTO is presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago. This series of breathtaking black-and-white photographs dissolves the lines between time, memory, and history in icons of modernist architecture that include the Eiffel Tower, the Guggenheim Bilbao, and Corbusier's Notre-Dame-du-Haut in Ronchamp.

Hiroshi Sugimoto was first commissioned to photograph great works of architecture in 1997 for the MCA exhibition At the End of the Century: One Hundred Years of Architecture (1999). The Hiroshi Sugimoto: Architecture exhibition represents the first time the series are shown together. Manilow Senior Curator Francesco Bonami explains the conceptual nature of the work, "Sugimoto has two recurring obsessions: history and time. He once described this work as 'architecture after the end of the world,' which is interesting when you consider how he uses time – in long exposures -- to literally blur reality and question architecture and its history."

Hiroshi Sugimoto is known for taking years to work through a series of long-exposure works on themes ranging from museum dioramas, movie theaters, seascapes, and historical wax figures. The new architectural series runs counter to the traditional sense of a photograph as capturing a moment in time. By sometimes leaving the lens open for hours Hiroshi Sugimoto captures the essence, rather than the specifics, of his subject.

Hiroshi Sugimoto established his reputation for working in series in 1976 with a group of photographs of natural history museum dioramas that questioned what is real and what is reconstructed. For his following series, Hiroshi Sugimoto chose the interior of movie theaters built in the 1920s and 1930s. By using a time exposure the length of the film, the result was an illuminated but blank white rectangle that paid homage to the Minimalists.

His series of seascapes occupied him for over 20 years. Taken primarily at night, they exhibit a more spiritual relationship to time. Divided into simply "water and air," the seascapes inspire a zen-like sense of contemplation and timelessness with their sublime transitions between sea and sky. The seascapes were followed by a series of photographs of life-size historical figures in wax museums. These frozen portraits have a distinct sense of artificiality, reinforced by the varied time periods being brought together in one space.

The architectural icons in his most recent series Hiroshi Sugimoto: Architecture represent the fifth major theme that Sugimoto has explored in depth. With this series, Hiroshi Sugimoto has essentially broken all the rules of architectural photography. Photographing great landmarks of modernist architecture around the world, Hiroshi Sugimoto has deliberately taken the images out of focus and at unusual angles, isolating the recognizable forms. The blurred forms evoke the passage of time, muting the architectural details and leaving the essence of the building; suggestive of the way in which our memories preserve images.

The unique installation at the MCA parallels the architectural space of the work. Each of the 30 five by six foot photographs is mounted on a dark gray monolithic wall (15 in each gallery space) with the photographs faced away from the entrance so the viewer must experience the entire space before encountering the actual work.

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Architecture is accompanied by a beautiful catalogue with full-page illustrations and essays by Francesco Bonami, John Yau, and Marco Di Michelis. 

After the exhibition concludes at the MCA, it will travel to the Williamson Gallery at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, from November 15, 2003, to February 8, 2004.

MCA - MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, CHICAGO

220 East Chicago Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611

www.mcachicago.org

John Currin, Des Moines Art Center - Works on Paper

John Currin: Works on Paper
Des Moines Art Center
February 13, 2003 - April 27, 2003

The Des Moines Art Center presents John Currin: Works on Paper, the first museum exhibition to focus on the drawings of John Currin. 

Chosen with the artist’s participation, this important exhibition features a selection of 30 drawings that presents an overview of John Currin’s work in the medium from 1990 until the present. John Currin’s drawings allude to art history, but also respond to contemporary sensibilities. Among other sources, he references the art of the Renaissance, Italian Mannerism, French Rococo, and popular illustration. Humor, absurdity, and technical virtuosity mark the artwork. Often sexually charged, but always psychologically jarring, John Currin’s work points the way for a new mode of realism in contemporary art.

John Currin’s drawings are frequently preliminary sketches for paintings, as seen in Three Friends, 1998, or they function as exercises to resolve compositional problems and to enhance skills. Many are refined and complete works of art; others are obviously gestural and quickly done. As such, the drawings illuminate the artist’s decision-making processes and provide documentation of his creative method. All of the drawings focus on depictions of people in a variety of circumstances; they are about sexuality, human emotions, and observing the nuances of character. The work has an air of artificiality, but real emotions survive in spite of the affectedness. John Currin describes his art as mixing a “celestial sweetness with a dark terror.”

Following its premiere in Des Moines, the exhibition can be seen at the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado, from June 6, 2003 – September 7, 2003.

Funding for John Currin: Works on Paper was provided by the Wallace-Reader’s Digest Funds, the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, and the Corporate Council through the Major Exhibition Fund.

DES MOINES ART CENTER

4700 Grand Avenue, Des Moines, Iowa 50312

www.desmoinesartcenter.org

Hans Bellmer - Vintage Prints, Marvelli Gallery, NYC

Hans Bellmer: Vintage Prints 

Marvelli Gallery, New York

February 13 - March 22, 2003

Marvelli Gallery presents an exhibition of vintage prints by German artist Hans Bellmer (1902-1975). Continuing the exploration of the influence of Bellmer's photographs on contemporary art - begun with the show Negative Spaces and further investigated in Desiring Machines curated by Marcello Marvelli and Helaine Posner at Dorsky Gallery, Marvelli Gallery now exhibits a rare group of vintage prints from the years 1934-1949.

Traditionally associated with surrealism, Hans Bellmer is emerging as one of the 20th Century's most influential artists. Bellmer's photographs of dolls are eccentric masterpieces of emotional intensity and formal sophistication that provide a clear precedent for Cindy Sherman, Francesca Woodman and for a generation of younger photographers such as Anna Gaskell and Annika Von Hausswolff, among many.

Hans Bellmer's work is very complex not only in its layers of meaning and possible psychoanalytic interpretations, but also in its emotional intensity, achieved by expressionistic lighting and unusual framing that create a morbid and suspended atmosphere. Feelings of desire are projected onto the body of the doll in a way that remains controversial and disturbing today. the doll also evokes emotions of entrapment, loneliness, loss and sexual desire as well as vulnerability and nostalgia, and triggers unexpected emotions of empathy in the viewer.

Hans Bellmer's photographs have recently been exhibited at a retrospective held at the International Center of Photography in New York and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the exhibition Surrealism: Desire Unbound.

MARVELLI GALLERY

526 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.marvelligallery.com

Ingar Krauss, Marvelli Gallery, New York - The Cat's Eye

Ingar Krauss: The Cat's Eye

Marvelli Gallery, New York

February 13 - March 22, 2003

Marvelli Gallery presents The Cat's Eye, the first New York exhibition of German photographer Ingar Krauss. In this show, he presents a series of b&w photographs portraying peculiar girls and boys moving in the fragile space between reality and dream, childhood and adulthood, the inner and the outer world.

With sensitivity and intuition, Ingar Krauss creates portraits of children suspended between sadness and sensuality, vulnerability and mystery. The images of these uncanny children are charged with psychological intensity. Choosing children who grew up in marginal areas, far from homogenizing metropolitan contexts, Ingar Krauss focuses on their psychological features: absorbed in themselves, melancholically dreaming, tentatively sensual, naturally serious and sad. These children's psychological poignancy is almost a challenge to the viewer. The carefully chosen backgrounds enhance the complexity of these portraits: from floral wallpaper to dry institutional settings, from mysterious rooms to moody outdoor environments. In these formally striking pictures, Ingar Krauss carefully modulates light and composition in order to achieve a balance between subject and surroundings.

A self-taught photographer, Ingar Krauss has only recently started to exhibit his photographs, gaining immediate recognition. His work has been exhibited in Berlin, at the National Portrait Gallery in London and at Kunsthalles in Erfurt and Speyer, Germany.

MARVELLI GALLERY

526 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.marvelligallery.com 

Transcend Brings a Full Line-Up of Flash Products to PMA 2003

Version en français à venir

Transcend invites attendees of PMA 2003 to check out the full line of high quality, top performance Transcend flash products.

Transcend offers a lot of products the digital photographer needs, including flash memory media, readers, adapters, and flash drives to record, store, and transfer digital images. Transcend flash memory media are available in various form factors including the Ultra Performance 30X CompactFlash, SmartMedia Card, XD Flash Card, MultiMediaCard, Memory Stick, and Secure Digital Card. To deal with the proliferation in flash media form factors, Transcend provides a range of Card Reader/Writers that include the 3-in-1, 6-in-1, and 7-in-1 USB 2.0 High Speed Card Reader/Writer with up to 128MB of built-in flash memory. To make the use of Flash media extremely convenient for consumers, Transcend provides a number of adapters with a variety of interfaces.

Also on display will be the Transcend’s award winning JetFlash USB Flash Drive — the Ultimate Portable Storage Device. Now available with up to 2GB of memory (Feb, 2003), JetFlash eliminates the need for floppy disks or CDs. JetFlash features more than just a simple Write-Protection switch for security, JetFlash allows Password Protection of the most sensitive data. With its Boot-Up Function, JetFlash can also be configured to serve as an MS-DOS Startup Disk. Transcend will be featured among the almost 700 exhibitors that will greet more than 25,000 visitors to PMA 2003 from March 2 through March 5 at the Las Vegas Convention Center, South Halls. Transcend will be located in the Exhibition Hall on the 2nd floor in Booth Number Q140.

http://www.transcendusa.com/

Source: Transcend - Press Release - 14.02.2003

Away from Home, Wexner Center offsite, Colombus - Franz Ackermann, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Allora y Calzadilla, Sout Piel, Raul Cordero, Gregory Green, Jac Leirner, Ken Lum, Lee Mingwei, Marcos Ramirez, Jill Rowinski

Away from Home

Franz Ackermann, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Allora y Calzadilla, Sout Piel, Raul Cordero, Gregory Green, Jac Leirner, Ken Lum, Lee Mingwei, Marcos Ramirez, Jill Rowinski

Wexner Center offsite, Colombus

February 1 – April 20, 2003

The Wexner Center for the Arts takes to the road for Away from Home, a provocative and playful exhibition featuring new projects by artists from around the globe, on view at the Columbus College of Art & Design. Away from Home, organized by the Wexner Center, reflects on issues of home, travel, exile, communication, and sense of place.

The exhibition features 11 projects in a wide range of media—painting, sculpture, photography, film, installation, performance, and interactive art—by emerging artists from five continents. Four of the pieces were commissioned for this exhibition, including one by Wexner Center Residency Award recipient Lee Mingwei.

Away from Home is one of a series of exhibitions presented off-site during the renovation of the Wexner Center’s galleries. The works will be on view in CCAD’s Canzani Center Gallery and in the Canzani Center lobby.

THE ARTISTS

Franz Ackermann, whose work has been called “psychedelic and apocalyptic” by The New York Times, is creating a 60-foot wall painting on the themes of traveling, mapping, and leaving and returning home. A German native, he has had solo exhibitions all over the world, most recently in Madrid; Wolfsburg, Germany; and Amsterdam.

Rising star Eija-Liisa Ahtila presents the video work Consolation Service, a poignant look at the breakup of a home. Ahtila is a Finnish film and video artist who creates experimental narrative fiction exploring human relationships. Consolation Service was lauded by Art in America as “effective precisely for its simmering restraint: technical assurance without bravado, intense performances unmarred by vanity…” ARTNews raved, “Ahtila achieves something that David Lynch can only attempt, creating a closely parallel dimension onscreen that is distinctly bizarre yet still rings true.”

Allora y Calzadilla (American-born Jennifer Allora and Cuban-born Guillermo Calzadilla) believe that it is “impossible to know the inner reality of other people.” In their Seeing Otherwise, they have digitally manipulated a series of photographs to show the perspective of the subject in the photo, rather than the perspective of the viewer or the photographer. Seeing Otherwise was presented at the 2000 Habana Bienal; Away from Home will include new pieces in the series, shot in Puerto Rico and Morocco. 

Sout Piel, a derogatory term that connotes divided alliances and racial tension, is also the name of South African artist Lisa Brice’s latest series. The work offers internationally understood symbols (e.g. pictograms of first aid or baggage claim) that have been altered to form mini-narratives depicting fear and flight. These subverted images offer confrontational, alternative interpretations of the original signs. 

Cuban native Raul Cordero unveils a brand new work as part of his Hello/Goodbye series—photo lenticulars (dual images viewed simultaneously) of his temporary homes during visits in five cities: New York, Columbus, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and Paris. Raul Cordero often explores how a sense of place can be relayed through iconic signs or images welcoming visitors. One of his previous pieces in the series reveals front and back views of a famous Las Vegas sign.

American artist Gregory Green, whose work often deals with controversial subjects such as bombs and chemicals, now offers his much less controversial M.I.T.A.R.B.U. (Mobile Internet, Television, and Radio Broadcast Unit), a multimedia, interactive work set up in a 1967 Volkswagen Westfalia Campmobile. With lawn chairs placed outside the camper, the piece becomes a social setting with Internet access, a pirate radio station, and a television screen projecting real-time images of the gallery. With this project, Green juxtaposes the systems of control imposed on society by various forms of authority, and the strategies adopted by individuals and communities to overturn the social order and seize power. Green, who spent his childhood on U.S. Air Force bases, often explores themes of power and struggle with authority in his work.

Jac Leirner’s collage work shows off items she has accumulated during her travels in her native Brazil and throughout the world. Her works Adhesives: #22 (Pair of Squares), #26 (Hard Core), and #27 (Blank)—all on view in Away from Home—involve collecting and assembling found objects, such as rock concert labels, envelopes, and motion-sickness bags, creating a physical testimonial of time and place. Art in America commented, “Jac Leirner’s casually assembled object-sculptures have an ingenious charm and elegance…” She currently resides in São Paulo.

Canadian Ken Lum’s confrontational work There Is No Place Like Home deals with issues of immigration and assimilation in a familiar yet disconcerting format—a billboard with often aggressive messages, such as “Go back to where you came from!” and “You call this a home?” He challenges viewers to examine their attitudes and biases about belonging and rejection. Lum received the 2002 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and is a professor in the department of Fine Arts at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Lee Mingwei of Taiwan, recipient of the 2002–03 Wexner Center Residency Award in Visual Arts, presents a new interactive teahouse for Away from Home. Lee has created a spiritual and social environment, complete with trees and benches, evocative of the rural tearooms of his childhood. His work is based on Ch’an Buddhist philosophies, often exploring basic human activities, such as cooking and letter writing. The New York Times recently commented on “his notion of art as an exchange, a heightened moment, an inspired encounter. … This is one of his underlying ideas: the impossibility of owning the experience of art.”

Marcos Ramirez, who is known as “Erre” in his native Mexico, has created an iconic signpost that indicates the distance from Columbus to several other cities throughout the world. The piece, Crossroads, will be located outside the Canzani Center. Ramirez’s work explores the conflict between abstract information and physical realities. A version of the piece he is creating for Away from Home appeared in the 2000 Habana Bienal.

Cincinnati’s Jill Rowinski plays the perfect hostess in her multimedia, interactive, performance art piece Make Yourself at Home. She will cover the floor with rubber “welcome” mats (made in Ohio) and don more than 100 pink gingham aprons while welcoming visitors to the space periodically throughout the duration of the exhibition. On select days, a tenor will sing “Home on the Range” and other songs on the theme of home. Her previous works have also explored issues of domesticity while engaging viewers in conversations about sexual stereotyping; she once upholstered a city bus in pink vinyl and served cupcakes to riders during their daily commute.

THE CURATOR

Annetta Massie, associate curator and curator of Away from Home, has been with the Wexner Center since it opened in 1989, working especially on commissioned, sitespecific projects. Most recently she co-curated Mood River, one of the Center’s most popular exhibitions in its history. Among the many other exhibitions she has curated or co-curated are Udomsak Krisanamis; Ernesto Neto: Sister Naves; Rirkrit Tiravanjia: Untitled 1999 (reading from right to left); The Serial Attitude; Beverly Semmes: Stuffed Cat; Apocalyptic Wallpaper; Dawoud Bey; Carmel Buckley: Tools for the Imagination; and Oehlen Williams 95.

THE CATALOGUE

A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany Away from Home. The catalogue includes a foreword from Wexner Center Director Sherri Geldin, an introduction by curator Annetta Massie, and commentaries by distinguished contributors. Essayists include Mark Cousins of the Architectural Association and professor at the London Consortium; Jan Avgikos, art historian and critic; and Jeffrey Kipnis, the Wexner Center’s curator of architecture and design.

Away from Home is organized by the Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University, and copresented by the Columbus College of Art & Design.

COLUMBUS COLLEGE OF ART & DESIGN

Columbus College of Art & Design, a private, four-year, degree-granting institution of higher education, prepares tomorrow’s creative leaders for professional careers. With a history of commitment to fundamentals and quality, CCAD advances a distinct, challenging, and inclusive learning culture that supports individual development in art, design, and humanities. For more on CCAD, visit www.ccad.edu.

WEXNER CENTER FOR THE ARTS

THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

1871 North High Street, Columbus, Ohio 43210

www.wexarts.org

Updated post

Walker Art Gallery Liverpool first year reopening' s anniversary

Following 18 months closure for a £4.3million refurbishment, Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool welcomed the public back on 8 February 2002. Walker Art Gallery, “The National gallery of the North” of the UK, celebrates the first anniversary of its reopening.

The improved facilities at Walker Art Gallery have been a resounding success, with 222,000 visitors over the last year. This is an increase of 76% compared to the same period 1999-2000 (the last full year before the builders started work).

The range and quality of exhibitions Walker Art Gallery is now able to show in the new temporary exhibition galleries as proved popular with visitors. Over the year it has hosted historical epics, including George Romney 1734-1802: British art's forgotten genius, Turner’s Journeys of the Imagination, the Earl & the Pussycat and the current exhibition Henry VIII Revealed. More modern tastes have also been catered for with the John Moores 22 exhibition of contemporary painting, the art of Paul McCartney and the newly opened A Maverick Eye: The Photography of John Deakin.

So far the busiest months have been February 2002 with 30,904 visitors and July 2002, when 24,690 people came through the door including distinguished guests – HRH The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh who met Sir Paul McCartney in his exhibition, the Capital of Culture judges and ministers from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. However these records could well be broken later this year when Walker Art Gallery holds the first major exhibition for over thirty years of Pre-Raphaelite artist Rossetti.

WALKER ART GALLERY
William Brown Street
Liverpool
L3 8EL

Open Mon-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 12-5pm

Kendell Geers, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London - Rogue States

Kendell Geers: Rogue States

Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

7 February – 15 March 2003

Stephen Friedman Gallery presents an exhibition of new works by Kendell Geers.

Kendell Geers is known for creating installations, sculptures and situations which assault our senses by means of carefully selected and appropriated materials, sound, and manipulated film footage. On first impression work that appears tough and confrontational slowly reveals itself to be poignant, even poetic. Kendell Geers brings to the forefront the most extreme and intimate emotional states in the human psyche. Questioning the nature of desire, violence, horror or ecstasy, the artist disturbs commonly accepted moral codes and puts into doubt the principles by which good and bad are judged. The intensity of the works does not allow any escape from the resulting impact. This practice, multi-layered and rich in references, is sometimes made obvious by title or use of medium but is more often concealed for the viewer to discover. Kendell Geers tempts the audience to peer over the edge, to confront their own true selves, to accept responsibility for their own actions and to forfeit security for freedom.

For his exhibition at Stephen Friedman Gallery, Kendell Geers has installed a large text piece which covers the gallery windows. It is an extract of a succession of hundreds of words from the dictionary and can be viewed from both the outside and the inside of the gallery. A variety of objects are shown in the front space. On the floor, a clamp holds together several books, all featuring the word 'revolution' on their spines. A sphere made from surveillance mirrors sits on the ground. In a corner of the room, a cube is installed made of tape and alarm signs which are usually displayed outside of homes to discourage burglars. Also included is a sculpture of an antique religious figure wrapped in chevron tape, a material often used to cordon off areas of danger. In the back gallery a sculpture, made from different kinds of connected padlocks, creates a large square carpet that covers the floor.

Kendell Geers has exhibited extensively around the world, most notably at Documenta 11 and The Short Century show in 2002, and the Carnegie International in 1999. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, 2002, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, 2001 and Le Consortium in Dijon and Museum für Angewandte Kunst Wien in 2000. In England, Kendell Geers has shown at Delfina Project Space in 2001 and was part of the Arts Council touring exhibition, Trauma, 2001.

STEPHEN FRIEDMAN GALLERY

25-28 Old Burlington Street, London W1S 3AN

www.stephenfriedman.com

Emmet Govin, Nelson Gallery, UC Davis - Changing the Earth - Aerial Photographs

Emmet Gowin: Changing the Earth - Aerial Photographs
Nelson Gallery, University of California, Davis
February 6 – March 14, 2003

Every picture is environmental. That is one of the overwhelmingly wonderful things about photography; no matter how much one intends to rid the picture of environment, which is to say living substance, something of it is nonetheless there. - Emmet Gowin, Interview with Philip Brookman, 2001

Emmet Gowin: Changing the Earth - Aerial Photographs is the first major exhibition in more than ten years of work by the internationally recognized photographer. Presented at the Richard L. Nelson Gallery & The Fine Arts Collection, the exhibition features ninety-two images created by Emmet Gowin since 1986. The artist's growing body of work bears witness to how humankind has visibly scarred and continues to alter the Earth's surface - the main theme in Emmet Gowin's series of aerial photographs.

The exhibition concentrates Emmet Gowin's rich, hand-toned black and white landscape images into a series that depict alarming views of the Earth's disturbed surface. The images appear as starkly beautiful compositions of light and form which invite long and lingering contemplation, while his subject matter raises alarm for environmental concerns.

Emmet Gowin had for many years been making portraits of his family and landscape photographs throughout the United States and Europe, as well as teaching photography at Princeton University, when, in 1980, the eruption of Mount Saint Helens moved him to charter a plane and, with a hand-held camera, made pictures of the natural devastation below. He returned there in 1986 to experience a pivotal transformation in both human and artistic terms.

In 1986 returning, I thought, for the last time to Mount Saint Helens, I took a side trip to Yakima, Washington, and a flight that changed my whole perception of the age in which I live. In less than two hours flying over the Hanford Reservation, a pattern of relationships and a dark history of places and events emerged. Still visible after forty years were the pathways, burial mounds, and waste disposal trenches, as well as skeletal remains of a city once used by over thirty thousand people who built the first reactor and enriched the first uranium. What I saw, imagined, and now know, was that a landscape had been created that could never be saved. I began in the next year to search for the other signs of our "nuclear age": missile silos, production sites, water treatment and disposal sites - in short, the realities that I had unconsciously forgotten. - Emmet Gowin, Interview with Toby Jurovics, 1996

Emmet Gowin's first photograph of this abandoned nuclear reactor site, home of the Manhattan Project, is a key image in the exhibition. Old Hanford City Site and the Columbia River; Hanford Nuclear Reservation near Richland, Washington are among the works in the exhibition from the 1980s that include images of mining explorations in Montana, weapons and bomb disposal sites in Utah, an alkali wash and dry watering hole in New Mexico, and an abandoned trailer park on an Apache reservation in Arizona.

In 1992, Emmet Gowin traveled in the Czech Republic for two years for aerial explorations of strip coal and chemo-petrol mines, power stations, and evidence of exploitation and devastation from the Soviet-era. Throughout the 1990's, Emmet Gowin directed his attention to photograph the American West; most frequently the Nevada Test Site and agricultural tracts using pivot irrigation in Kansas. Battlefields in Kuwait, an Israeli suburban settlement in Jerusalem, and golf courses under construction in Japan are among Emmet Gowin's global subjects.

Emmet Gowin was born in Danville, Virginia in 1941. He is a graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond; and received an M.A. from The Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. Since 1973 he has been teaching photography in Princeton University's Program in Visual Art, of which he is currently the director. Among his many awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship (1974); National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1977 and 1979); The Seattle Arts Commission (1980); the Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts from the State of Pennsylvania (1983) and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts (1993-1994). In 1997 Emmet Gowin received the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton. The first solo exhibition of his work was presented by The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, in 1983. Emmet Gowin/Photographs: The Vegetable Earth is but a Shadow retrospective exhibition was organized by The Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1990 and traveled extensively. Photographs: Landscape in the Nuclear Age was presented in Japan in 1992, the same year his first European retrospective exhibition was presented in Paris.

Emmet Gowin: Changing the Earth - Aerial Photographs was organized by The Yale University Art Gallery, and Jock Reynolds, The Henry J. Heinz II Director, and Curator of the exhibition. The exhibition is accompanied by a handsome fully-illustrated book with essays by Jock Reynolds, author of many articles on American photography and contemporary art; nature writer and environmentalist Terry Tempest Williams; and a revealing conversation between Emmet Gowin and Philip Brookman, senior curator of photography and media arts at The Corcoran Gallery of Art.

Richard L. Nelson Gallery & The Fine Arts Collection
1 Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616
Room 124, Art Building, University of California, Davis
www.nelsongallery.ucdavis.edu