Petah Coyne, Julie Saul Gallery, NYC - Spring Snow Exhibition

Petah Coyne: Spring Snow 

Julie Saul Gallery, New York 

October 27 - December 8, 2001 

The Julie Saul Gallery presents its first solo exhibition of new photographic work and a sculptural installation by Petah Coyne, entitled Spring Snow. This is Coyne¹s second photographic exhibition in New York, the first was held in 1996. The installation includes fifteen prints and two hanging sculptures from 1996/97 in her characteristic medium of assembled bows, ribbons and birds melded with wax.

The photographs convey a sense of youth and energy. The swirling imagery of the black and white prints features tumbling children, gliding brides and debutantes dancing through dreamy space. The subjects relate to the female sculptural figures incorporated into Coyne¹s new sculptural work- Madonnas transformed into metaphoric nuns, birds and veiled sirens. This new sculpture is exhibited concurrently in an exhibition entitled White Rain at the new Galerie Lelong space at 528 West 26th St. from November 3 through December 8.

The title Spring Snow was inspired and derived from the Japanese writer Mishima's final series of novels which were written at a time in his life and concern matters similar to those of Coyne. The artist sees new beginnings in this series- an attempt to capture the freshness and energy of youth- as something remembered in feeling rather than narrative. She also intends for the viewer to bring their own emotional and visual memories to create their own reality in relation to the images. The installation includes prints ranging from small to monumental, creating a sense of moving in and out in the same way that Petah Coyne herself moves around while making photographs. The sculptures, one black, the other white, evoke the duality of all Petah Coyne's work, a celebration of life joined with a recognition of death and mortality. Petah Coyne sees her photographic work as both independent and linked to her sculpture activity. She has noted that in some ways they function as the drawings relating to the sculpture- both studies and summations.

Petah Coyne's work has been shown extensively in the United States and abroad, including the 2000 Biennial of the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, the Aldrich Museum, Connecticut and a photographic survey appeared at the Weatherspoon Museum at the University of North Carolina in 1997.

JULIE SAUL GALLERY

535 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011

www.saulgallery.com

Carter Potter, Julie Saul Gallery, NYC - Spacers - Film Paintings Exhibition

Carter Potter - Spacers

Julie Saul Gallery, New York

April 26 - June 2, 2001

The Julie Saul Gallery presents a solo exhibition of "Film Paintings" by Los Angeles based artist Carter Potter. For nearly ten years UCLA-trained Carter Potter has been using film-stock as the medium from which he constructs "Paintings"- in which he stretches the "leaders, feet and spacers" from discarded film around stretchers in horizontal rows, which when assembled read as translucent minimalist canvases. Carter Potter has always worked with found sculptural materials- from thrift store paintings to abandoned sofas- and as if responding to Marcel Duchamp’s abandonment of painting for the "assisted ready made" in 1913, he has transformed the objet trouvé back into painting. It is appropriate and ironic that Carter Potter has chosen the "primary medium" of his native hometown- the detritus of the end-product.

Carter Potter’s film paintings have subtly evolved over the last decade- a transition that can be discussed with a vocabulary similar to that used to describe minimalist painting- from densely woven strips of 16 and 35mm stock to his current use 70mm IMAX material. Michael Duncan wrote in Art in America that these paintings "slyly recall ... the Zen-like conceptual landscapes of Agnes Martin (while) using cinema’s throwaway bits and pieces to transcend the medium’s own frenetic expostulatory nature." The milky translucent spacers are interspersed with bands of rich and delicately colored foots and ends which also contain images of marks, numbers, and sometimes even images and text relating to the film from which they were plucked- thus providing the titles such as "The Greatest Story Ever Told (reel 3 roll A)" . In this exhibition two six-foot and two four-foot works (he always works in a square format) are "face off" within the symetrical space of the gallery.

Carter Potter’s work is included in the collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Panza Collection and the collection of Eileen and Peter Norton, Santa Monica. He has had solo exhibitions at the Rocket Gallery, London, Angles Gallery, Los Angeles, and Howard Yezerski in Boston and has been included in numerous group exhibitions including the 44th Biennial at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington.

JULIE SAUL GALLERY

535 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011

www.saulgallery.com

Kate Breakey, Julie Saul Gallery, New York - Small Deaths Exhibition

Kate Breakey: Small Deaths 
Julie Saul Gallery, New York
March 15 - April 21, 2001 

The Julie Saul Gallery presents Australian born artist Kate Breakey’s first solo exhibition in New York. The exhibition includes a selection of large painted photographs of birds from the series Small Deaths with works from 1997 to the present. Kate Breakey describes her interest in "these individual creatures...little representatives of all the lives and deaths that we disregard." She is concerned with expressing a reverence for nature and life. The dead things that she finds or is given, plant, fowl, reptile and mammal, possess a fundamental spirit beyond the shell that is left behind. In collecting and examining these "small deaths" she invokes the role of the naturalist and artist. Her titles which are inscribed on the print provide the Latin scientific taxonomy, followed by the popular name. Kate Breakey enters the realm of text and image, and references the nineteenth century practice of assembled collections of specimens into natural history collections.

Like the photogenic drawings of Henry Fox Talbot, Kate Breakey’s coloration varies considerably from the reddish tones to the pale grays, lemons and lilacs. Her use of transparent photographic oils and pencil, subtlety applied to a toned gelatin silver print, create lush soft focused surfaces and depths. The large scale format of the images monumentalizes the seemingly small bearing of her subjects and furthers the commemoration of their fugitive aspect.

From early Daguerrean funerary portraits, the pictorialist acceptance of the classic subjects like cemeteries, or the nature morte and vanitas traditions in art, these still life’s of dead birds are allegorical novellas. The depiction and interpretation of death’s presence whether for documentary or expressive purposes conciliates a vision of self with more than the nullity of death.

A monograph of Kate Breakey’s work will be published in October of 2001 by the University of Texas Press and her work is included in the collections of Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Australian National Gallery, Canberra, Australia, Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego and numerous private collections.

JULIE SAUL GALLERY
535 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
www.saulgallery.com