Peter Holl, Galerie Juliètte Jongma, Amsterdam - The Constellations

Peter Holl: The Constellations

Galerie Juliètte Jongma, Amsterdam

27 November 2004 – 7 January 2005

The exhibition 'The Constellations' is the first solo exhibition of the German artist PETER HOLL (1971) in the Netherlands.

Peter Holl displays in his artworks a clear reference towards he American photorealistic movement from the 70s. This movement rebelled against the subjective way of painting and expressed themselfs against the usual content and expectations of a portrait. Everything is superficial there's no depth within the image at the most it is indifferent, 'it is what it is'.

Peter Holl seems to implement this theorie. He did not choose reproductions of selfmade photographs nor does he portray his friends but he focusses on adapted, artficial images from (fashion) magazines. His subject choise seems to have a strong reference towards distant painting. The artist isn't in surch of fixing a moment like his American (pre-andisters) but in search of an optical play. His portraits show clear signs of several images mixed with one-and-other. Your eye tries to unravel their riddle and play with the wish to crack there code. At the same time it is clear that it is not in our advantage to decifer, the challenge is within the looking itself.

The exhibition 'The Constellations' which means 'stars' or a configuration of celestial body's seen from the earth, gives a reference to the mathematics. A mathematician uses this discription for the movement of the body with time as the fourth dimension. Herewith time becomes as equal as spacious coordinates. Time as a fourth dimension is mostly used in astronomy. The stars we see are seen from the past.

The artist gives with this element reference towards artists like Marcel Duchamp and movements like dadaisme and futurism where researches of movement where represented. Peter Holl gives a contemporary representation of this element. 

GALERIE JULIETTE JONGMA

Gerard Douplein 23, 1073XE Amsterdam

www.juliettejongma.com

Anders Petersen, Marvelli Gallery, NYC - Close Distance

Anders Petersen: Close Distance

Marvelli Gallery, New York

November 23, 2004 - January 31, 2005

Marvelli Gallery presents the first comprehensive exhibition of important Swedish photographer Anders Petersen in the United States. Anders Petersen exhibit an installation from the book Close Distance (2002) together with prints from the book Nobody Has Seen Everything (1995). In the back room there is a selection of rare vintage prints from the book Café Lehmitz (1978).

Café Lehmitz, the title of Anders Petersen’s first book, is a tavern in Hamburg where the photographer spent time at the end of the sixties. Petersen frequented this bar in which all conventions are suspended, and in which a raw life, full of humor and despair, takes place: a rough place and a kind of home at the same time. Café Lehmitz is a blunt, merciless book about life outside the bourgeoisie, in the windswept, unprotected zone where the only thing that counts is who someone really is.

Several books followed Café Lehmitz: among them, Nobody Has Seen Everything (1995), a book about about people in a psychiatric clinic. In collaboration with individual patients, Anders Petersen  staged scenes about the lost and abysmal aspects of existence in which depression and euphoria both have their place.

More recently, in the book Close Distance, Anders Petersen’s work has developed increasingly into a diary. His photographs reveal his close proximity to people, his “hypnotic intimacy” with them. These are not pictures of safe, balanced people, but images of compulsion, longing, aggression and sexuality, with the laughter and tears of despair.

A key figure of European photography, Anders Petersen is a photographer emblematic of a type of social photography where the total involvement of the author with his subject makes a militant work. Petersen aims to show the hidden aspects of human nature. Anders Petersen’s work belongs in the ranks of Ed van der Elsken, Nan Goldin and Daido Moriyama.

ANDERS PETERSEN

Born in Stockholm in 1944, Anders Petersen trained with famous Swedish photographer Christer Stromholm and then carried on his studies at the Cinema University and at the Dramatiska Institute in Stockholm between 1973 and 1974. In 1978, the publication of Café Lehmitz, marked the beginning of his carreer. He has had numerous solo exhibitions in Antwerp, Arles, Evry, Gothenborg, Hamburg, Helsinki, Herten, Istanbul, Karlsruhe, Karlstad, London, Malmo, Nancy, Nice, Oslo, Paris, Stockholm, Turin and other places. He has participated in many group exhibitions in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. He has published several books, among them: Café Lehmitz (Shirmer/Mosel, Munich, 1978); Fangelse (Prison) (Norstedts, 1984); Ragang till Karleken (Boundary to Love) (Norstedts, 1991); Ingen Har Sett Allt (Nobody Has Seen Everything) (Legus, 1995); Anders Petersen - Photographs 1966-96 (Journal, Stokholm, 1997); Du Mich Auch (Journal, Stokholm, 2002); Close Distance (Journal Stockholm, 2002); Ich Dich Lieben, Du Mich Auch (Fotomuseum Winterthur, 2002). His work is included in important public collections, such as: Museum of Modern Art, Stockholm; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg; Bibliotheque National, Paris; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Det Nationale Fotomuseum, Copenhagen; among others.

MARVELLI GALLERY

526 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.marvelligallery.com

Sara Radstone, Barrett Marsden Gallery, London

Sara Radstone
Barrett Marsden Gallery, London
19 November 2004 - 8 January 2005

Sara Radstone explores themes of history, memory and place in works that probe the traces left by human activity and their evocative power. Some recent sources of reflection include sites as diverse as Rodinsky‘s room in London‘s East End, with its accumulations of matter marking the idiosyncratic interests of a single life, to the landscape of North Cornwall that bears the imprints of the different demands on the land made by successive generations of people.

Rather than employing explicit signs, Sara Radstone often composes sections of a piece from casts taken from man-made or natural artefacts, which, through the stages of her process, become only faintly identifiable. A number of the works are composed of fragments, as if remnants of some former whole. Many hang from the wall - their outlines echoed by shadows that raise uncertainty as to where the piece finally ends and the background begins.

While surfaces are densely textured - dented, eroded, or carrying the accretions of time - the forms are stark and understated, their colours elemental. Sara Radstone has described her approach as seeking ‘simplification ...a paring down to austerity’ and her aim to make artefacts that appear as ‘nudges in the line of vision.’

Ultimately Sara Radstone‘s works contain a penetrating abstract charge, one that evades literal interpretation and which finds true resonance at an unspoken level of human existence.

SARA RADSTONE (b. 1955) trained at Herefordshire College of Art (1975-1976) and Camberwell School of Art, London (1976-1979). Acclaimed as one of Britain‘s leading ceramic artists she has won a number of major awards including an Arts Foundation Fellowship (1993). Other stands of her professional career include work as a lecturer and writer within the visual arts field. Radstone‘s work has been exhibited internationally and is found in the collections of Los Angeles County Museum, USA; Shigaraki Cultural Park, Japan; Museum die Kunsthandwerk, Frankfurt, Germany; the Victoria and Albert Museum, British Council and Crafts Council, London.

BARRETT MARSDEN GALLERY
17-18 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DN
www.bmgallery.co.uk

Mary Kim - Exhibition at MONA

Mary Kim, Oblique Structure: Odradek Tower. Drawings and Models

Detroit' Museum of New Art, November 13 - December 18, 2004

Mary Kim, a Cranbrook graduate and instructor at the College for Creative Studies, takes center stage at MONA with her colorful geometric towers, some of steel and some of wood. Simple yet complex, her painted pieces change as you move around the gallery, revealing hidden negative spaces and subtle shifts in color that are engaging.

MONA - MUSEUM OF NEW ART
7 N. Saginaw St.
Pontiac, Michigan 48342

Young Artists Exhibition at MONA in Detroit, Michigan

Museum of New Art, Pontiac, Michigan

The Museum of New Art's (MONA) new show reveals more than meets the eye. Head to the museum's Pontiac complex to see "The Next Big Thing", featuring new work by young artists, working in all disciplines.

Some standouts include Cynthia Randolph's studies of time and timing depicted in a series of digital photographs. One chronicles one day of urine flushing down toilet bowls, resulting in a grid of colors and gradations in light that don't look anything like what they are. Another work discovers the beauty of a surgical mask, light and disposable but able to protect from disease. The artist previous exhibition includes two National Scholastic Exhibit at Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washingthon, DC, in 1992 and 1994, A Sculpture Show at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1998) and two exhibits at Melting Point Gallery, San Francisco, California in 2001 and 2003.

Roland Lusk has created a room installation that takes you into a verdant yet somewhat sickly forest. Leaves of green fabric are suspended from the ceiling and stuck on the walls along with painted white tree fungus and antlers. The walls are papered in an oversized digital print - a cowhide tinted grass-green.

Michelle Hinebrook creates highly textured and veiled paintings – some pure abstractions, others with hidden figures – on tiles covered with netting culled from produce bags found on fruits and vegetables.

Other artists' include Kelly Rosebrock who has captured "fingerprints" of individual cell phones in her sparse, colorful photographs; Narine Kchikian, who curated the show, has created a minimalist room installation where illusions come into play; Georgia Vandewater, who creates paintings in vinyl that are variations on Da Vinci's "Circle of Man"; the artist Unholy Erection has created a funhouse of gender coding in his installation of photos and video; and Gabriel Hillebrand whose work in the Annex on the first floor combines grids, string  and books into a playful sculpture.

THE NEXT BIG THING
November 13 - December 18, 2004

MONA - MUSEUM OF NEW ART, DETROIT
7 N. Saginaw St.
Pontiac, Michigan 48342

Catherine Yass at Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Catherine Yass 
Alison Jacques Gallery, London
18 November - 23 December 2004

Alison Jacques Gallery presents a new film and series of four photographs on light boxes by Catherine Yass. Over the last year, Yass has been filming and photographing the Israel/Palestine separation wall from Israeli-controlled areas.

The resulting film entitled Wall, will be projected across the entire width of the gallery. Using a widescreen film format, Catherine Yass has concentrated on the physicality of the wall as it winds through communities and stretches across the landscape. The footage is structured in separate sequences, corresponding to recently constructed sections of the wall in Baqa, Qalqilya and Jerusalem.

Catherine Yass has developed a distinctive language which conveys her own personal response. As with her previous film Descent, for which she was nominated for the Turner Prize at Tate Britain (2002),  the single viewpoint and insistent camera movement are at once subjective and mechanical . The wall almost fills the frame, so buildings and minarets are only just visible behind it. The restricted viewpoint of the camera re-enacts the limited view imposed by the wall, and reflects the inability to see the other side. As well as representing a physical structure, the film shows the wall as, literally, a concrete manifestation of psychological barriers.

The photographs are on light boxes and underlaid with a blue negative, which gives the wall the quality of a mirage hovering somewhere in the imagination. In the areas where the wall is still under construction, building blocks lying in the rubble take on an eerie sense of ruin, as though they are part of an archeological site. The concrete blocks of the wall bear a resemblance to modernist architecture and sculpture, only here it is the wall which imposes the grid and brings modernism back to contemporary experience in a form where aesthetics and politics become indissoluble.

Catherine Yass was born in London (1963) and graduated with an MA from Goldsmiths College (1990). In 2002, Catherine Yass was nominated for the Turner Prize at Tate Britain. Since then, Yass has collaborated with Merce Cunningham on his world tour of Split Sides, which premiered at the Brooklyn Academy, New York (2003) and toured to Paris and London (The Barbican, October 5-9, 2004). Forthcoming projects include a solo show at the Herzilya Museum, Tel Aviv and participation in WOW at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle and Expo Tokyo, Japan (2005). Catherine Yass is represented in many public collections including The British Council, Tate, and The Jewish Museum, New York.

ALISON JACQUES GALLERY
4 Clifford Sreet, London W1X 1RB
www.alisonjacquesgallery.com

Salmagundi Club: An American Institution, Art Museum of Western Virginia, Roanoke, Virginia

Salmagundi Club: An American Institution 

Works by Robert Blum, William Merritt Chase, Emil Carlsen, Gari Melchers, Howard Chandler Christy, Frank Desch, Guy Wiggins, and other prominent American artists

Art Museum of Western Virginia, Roanoke, Virginia

November 5, 2004 - January 2, 2005

The Art Museum of Western Virginia presents Salmagundi Club: An American Institution. The exhibition features sixty works of art by Salmagundi Club members from the 1870s to the present, along with mugs decorated by prominent artists that were created to benefit the Salmagundi Clubís library, and artists' palettes, of which the Salmagundi Club has the world's largest collection.

A related exhibition of works by Salmagundi Club artists in the Art Museum's permanent collection will open Friday, November 19. Artists featured will include local favorites Walter Biggs and Allen Ingles Palmer, as well as Reynolds Beal, Ralph Blakelock, Walter Dorwin Teague, and others.

The Salmagundi Club was started in 1871 by a group of artists who gathered on Saturday nights to discuss each others works, paint and socialize. The name "Salmagundi" meaning a collection of odds and ends, was made popular by Washington Irving's book The Salmagundi Papers. By 1880, the popularity of the club had grown to such an extent that the organization was formally established. Through the Salmagundi Club, members formed a welcoming community where artists in New York City had a means to try out new ideas and have their work critiqued, create in a friendly atmosphere, and exhibit and network with other artists. In addition to their artistic endeavors, members of the Salmagundi Club also enjoyed each others company through boxing matches, social dinners and costume parties.

Throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Salmagundi Club was known for its exhibitions and influential membership. Many of the key figures in American art were Salmagundi Club members, including William Merritt Chase, Howard Chandler Christy, Childe Hassam, and George Inness, Jr. Artists with Virginia connections such as Walter Biggs, Gari Melchers and Allen Ingles Palmer also played active roles in the club.

ART MUSEUM OF WESTERN VIRGINIA

Center in the Square, One Market Square, Roanoke, Virginia 24011

artmuseumroanoke.org

Craig Kauffman: Works from the 1960s at Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York

Craig Kauffman: Works from the 1960s
Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York
November 11 - December 21, 2004

Franklin Parrasch Gallery presents an exhibition of select works from the mid to late 1960s by Los Angeles born artist Craig Kauffman. This exhibition of six works provides a small window to view the developing concepts and discoveries Craig Kauffman made within this intriguing and productive five year period.

Craig Kauffman began his career in the mid-1950's as an abstract painter exhibiting in Los Angeles first at Felix Landau Gallery then at Ferus Gallery, throughout its nine year history. Craig Kauffman's early work explored figure/ground relationships as defined by color, saturation and image density. By the mid 1960's Craig Kauffman became intrigued by commercial plastic signs in the Los Angeles area, particulary with vacuum formed plastic in which figurative elements were rendered in vibrantly colored relief along a background plane.

Craig Kauffman's initial forays with industrially produced plastic resulted in a series of flat rectangular planes embossed with convex linear (somewhat phallic) imagery, the versos of which were printed in vibrantly contrasting colors. These works, while pioneering in their execution retained many of the aesthetic gestures addressed in his previous paintings and drawings.

It was not until his next series of mold-formed plastic works, euphemistically referred to as "Washboards," that Craig Kauffman abandoned altogether the identifiable centralized image and embraced the ambiguous depth of field inherently produced by this industrially colored medium. These undulating rectangular reliefs create a funhouse mirror-like effect with color and light.

The convex reliefs from the Washboard series establishes a basis from which later experimentations with vacuum formed plastic led to a series of horizontal ellipses Craig Kauffman called "Bubbles." Merging qualities of pigment, plastic, and light, the "Bubble" successfully produced a range of formal and spatial arrangements that furthered this artist's ongoing investigations of perception. In these works (produced from 1967-1968) Craig Kauffman ceased all application of exterior pigmentation, as well as any iconic lines or gestural imagery. Using an industrial sprayer Craig Kauffman painted the interiors of these lozenge shaped forms with a specialized enamel commercially known as "Morano." "Morano," a specialized pearlescent lacquer, produced an exquisitely chatoyant surface that simultaneously reflects and refracts light. It was a toxic, extremely expensive material and had only a short lived commercial application in the then popular spector of hot rod industry.

Craig Kauffman's plastic forms once again morphed and evolved. He realized that plastic's innate tendency to atrophe from its own weight could be used to create a loop shape by slumping a 1/4 inch sheet over wire. Gradations of altering colors and the confluence of the back ground plane and the foreground (looping) plane vary the viewer's chromatic experience based on proximity and light. Cascading bands of translucent (Rothko-esque) pigmentation on the slumped plastic sheet bathe the background wall in varegated color.

Over the past two years Craig Kauffman's early work has been reexamined in a number of group exhibitions including "Ferus" at Gagosian Gallery in 2002, "LA's Finish Fetish" at Franklin Parrasch Gallery in 2003, and "A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958 - 1968," Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles the spring of 2004.

FRANKLIN PARRASCH GALLERY
20 W 57th St (between 5th and 6th aves.), New York, NY 10019
www.franklinparraschgallery.com

Contemporary Art of East Asia at San Diego Museum of Art + Other venues - Past in Reverse: Contemporary Art of East Asia

Past in Reverse: Contemporary Art of East Asia

San Diego Museum of Art

November 6, 2004 - March 6, 2005

The San Diego Museum of Art (SDMA) presents a major group exhibition featuring many important established and up-and-coming artists from China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Titled Past in Reverse: Contemporary Art of East Asia, this internationally touring exhibition organized by SDMA provides American museum goers a rare, yet extensive look at work from several vital artistic communities from Asia that are quickly gaining a foothold on the world cultural stage.

The exhibition is curated by SDMA's curator of contemporary art, Betti-Sue Hertz, and includes 21 artists and artist groups who have created innovative works representing some of the newest trends in an increasingly globalized art world. Among the featured artists are Soun-gui Kim, Cai Guo-Qiang, Wang Qingsong, Tadasu Takamine, Hiroshi Fuji, Michael Lin, and Leung Mee Ping. Major funding for the exhibition is provided by an Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award.

This multifaceted exhibition showcases cutting-edge artists working in a diversity of media—painting, sculpture, photography, video, installation, digital media—who use contemporary approaches that reflect their respective cultural and artistic backgrounds. Occupying several of the Museum's galleries, each artist's work is featured in a separate section while accompanying wall texts—in both English and Spanish—articulate how the artist is responding to historical precedents. By including recent, new, and commissioned works, the exhibition also serves as an introduction to the latest trends in contemporary East Asian art.

The artists and artist groups included in the exhibition, listed here by country or region of origin, are:

Contemporary Artists from China

- Cai Guo-Qiang (b. 1957, born in Quanzhou, lives in New York), drawing/public events

- Cao Fei (b. 1978, born and lives in Guangzhou), photography

- Shao Yinong and Muchen (b. 1961 and 1970, born in Xining and Lianong, both live in Beijing), photography

- Wang Jianwei (b. 1958, born in Sichuan Province, lives in Beijing), video

- Wang Qingsong (b. 1966, born in Hubei Province, lives in Beijing), video

- Yang Fudong (b. 1971, born in Beijing, lives in Shanghai), video

- Yangjiang Calligraphy Group with Zheng Guogu, Sha Yeya, Chen Zaiyan, and Sun Qinglin (live in Yangjiang), mixed-media installation

Contemporary Artists from Hong Kong

- Leung Mee Ping (b. 1961, born and lives in Hong Kong), video installation/performance

- Wilson Shieh (b. 1970, born and lives in Hong Kong), drawing

Contemporary Artists from Japan

- Ryoko Aoki (b. 1973, born in Hyougo, lives in Kyoto), drawing installation

- Hiroshi Fuji (b. 1960, born in Kyoto, lives in Fukuoka Prefecture), mixed-media installation

- Mitsushima Takayuki (b. 1954, born and lives in Kyoto), installation

- Tadasu Takamine (b. 1968, born in Kagoshima, lives in Gifu), mixed media installation/performance

- Shizuka Yokomizo (b. 1966, born in Tokyo, lives in London), photography/video

Contemporary Artists from South Korea

- Flyingcity: Urbanism Research Group (based in Seoul), interventions/mixed-media installation/video

- Hee-Jeong Jang (b. 1970, born and lives in Seoul), painting

- Soun-gui Kim (b. 1946, born in Pou-yo, Chung-Nam, lives in Paris), video installation/photography

- Kim Young Jin (b. 1961, born in Busan, lives in Seoul), video installation

Contemporary Artists from Taiwan

- G8: Public Relations and Art Consultants Collaborative (based in Taipei), interventions/installation

- Hung Yi (b. 1970, born and lives in Taichung), painting/sculpture/mixed-media installation

- Michael Lin (b. 1964, born in Tokyo, lives in Paris and Taipei), architectural painting

Accessing the past to map the future, these artists explore aesthetic and conceptual principles that are rooted in the arts and culture of their particular region. Whether they work in traditional genres such as painting and sculpture or newer technologies such as photography, video, and digital media, they assert their connection to Chinese, Korean, or Japanese culture through a variety of avenues.

For example, some artists like Wilson Shieh and the Yangjiang Calligraphy Group use traditional materials and techniques while others, like Cai Guo-Qiang and Soun-gui Kim, engage established religious iconography and philosophical ideas. Others, like Hiroshi Fuji and Cao Fei, explore interactions with the everyday physical world to reclaim endemic ways of seeing and being.

Another approach employed by certain artists is to reveal new views on their cultural history and interdependencies within the region by drawing on, for instance, craft-based methods (Ryoko Aoki, Tadasu Takamine), landscape and floral imagery (Michael Lin, Wang Qingsong, Yang Fudong, Hee-Jeong Jang), family histories (Kim Young Jin), or indigenous concepts of time and space (Soun-gui Kim, Shizuka Yokomizo, Mitsushima Takayuki). Still others address modern political histories and their impact on the individual and the construction of social relations and space in urban centers (Flying City, Wang Jianwei, G8).

The selection of artists presented in Past in Reverse reveal that in spite of cultural proximity, there is as much disconnect as common ground among artists from any particular region, placing into doubt the possibility of a regional aesthetic. What is clear is that as Asia continues to participate more wholeheartedly in the international art scene, it is slowly becoming more confident that its cultural impact, while not as influential as its economic one, is steadily growing.

Past in Reverse: Contemporary Art of East Asia is made possible in part by an Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award.

Exhibition Tour

- San Diego Museum of Art, Nov. 6, 2004-Mar. 6, 2005

- Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO, June 3-Sept. 4, 2005

- Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, Jan. 15-Mar. 12, 2006

- Hong Kong Museum of Art (pending)

(dates subject to change), 2006

Exhibition Catalogue

The exhibition is accompanied by a 176-page soft-cover catalogue featuring an introductory essay by the exhibition's curator Betti-Sue Hertz as well as four other scholarly essays by an international team of noted experts: Taehi Kang (South Korea), Li Xianting (China), Midori Matsui (Japan), and Zhang Zhaohui (China). Also included are extended entries devoted to each artist, a checklist of the exhibition, and biographies of the artists and essayists.

SAN DIEGO MUSEUM OF ART

1450 El Prado, Balboa Park, San Diego, CA

www.sdmart.org

Milton Avery, Knoedler & Company, New York - Onrushing Waves

Milton Avery: Onrushing Waves
Knoedler & Company, New York
November 4, 2004 – January 29, 2005

Knoedler & Company presents Milton Avery: Onrushing Waves. This focused exhibition on Milton Avery and his relationship to the sea includes paintings, both on canvas and paper, spanning the 1920s through the 1950s. Also included are a selection of the artist’s sketchbooks recording trips to California, Massachusetts, Maine and the South of France.

Milton Avery (1885–1965) continuously drew whatever was around him, and developed a working method of turning his sketches into watercolors, and watercolors into canvases. His summer visits to the sea began in the 1920, at the popular artist’s colony of Gloucester, Massachusetts. The earliest work in this exhibition, a watercolor, Rocky Coast, dates from one of those early trips. Milton Avery and his family went to the sea nearly every summer after that, and he constantly drew images of moving water, land, and sky. Milton Avery’s wife, the painter Sally Michel, recalled:

We were followers of the sea. On the beaches of Provincetown, Gloucester and the Gaspé we braved the surf and rocky shore, spending endless hours contemplating the sea … We spent a summer by the Pacific enthralled by the wild surf and the strange rock formations … But it was the sea, alternately black and mysterious or ruddy and gay that expressed the mystery and independence that makes its lure unfathomable. For Milton this was a subject to challenge again and again.

While Milton Avery’s depictions of the sea have been the subject of previous exhibitions, this is the first to focus on his treatment of the sea’s movement and energy in all its permutations.

Milton Avery: Onrushing Waves is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Arthur C. Danto. 

KNOEDLER & COMPANY
19 East 70th Street, New York, NY 10021
www.knoedlergallery.com

Jona Frank: High School photographs exhibition at Foley Gallery, New York

Jona Frank:  High School Foley Gallery, New York September 23 -­ November 27, 2004

MICHAEL FOLEY opens Foley Gallery this fall after 15 years of working with notable photography galleries including Fraenkel Gallery, Howard Greenberg Gallery and Yancey Richardson Gallery.  He is on the faculty of the International Center of Photography, New School University and the School of Visual Arts where he teaches and lectures on issues in contemporary photography.

In the spirit of photographer August Sander, JONA FRANK sets out to record the social dynamic of the American public high school by examining the adolescent social experience.  For three years, Jona Frank visited high schools across the United States, exploring the layered cliques, stereotypes and personalities that grow during the social experiment of high school.

Innocent, revealing and fresh, this series of color portraits from High School capture a turbulent period of experimentation and role-playing many teenagers confront as they attempt to find their place in the social landscape.  The range of these expressive uniforms that Frank uncovers, from the Cheerleader to the Chess Clubber to the X-File Fan serve as a microcosm for a society at large.

Through her photographs we discover a revealing search for identity and the battle with conformity.

Jona Frank’s portraits can evoke a sense of the familiar, connecting the viewer with the universal high school experience while evincing the freshness and individuality of today’s teenager.  The result is a perpetual, timeless and oddly recognizable return to high school.

Coinciding with her exhibition, Arenas Street Publishing will release the book of JONA FRANK’s photographs HIGH SCHOOL with a special forward by Gus Van Sant.

FOLEY GALLERY, NYC 

foleygallery.com