SCENES FROM THE SOUTH AT HOWARD GREENBERG
Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York
09.05.2013 - 01.06.2013
Scenes from the South, 1936-2012, an exhibition of thirty photographs interweaving historical and contemporary images made in the American South over more than 75 years, will be on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery from May 9 through June 1, 2013. An opening exhibition will be held on Thursday, May 9, from 6 to 8 p.m. The exhibition will be held in HGG Two, located next to the main gallery at 41 East 57th Street in New York City.
© Edward Burtynsky
The exhibition will present work by artists including Berenice Abbott, Bill Burke, Edward Burtynsky, William Christianberry, Bruce Davidson, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, William Gedney, Dorothea Lange, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Peter Sekaer, and emerging artists Caroline Allison, Mikael Kennedy, Joshua Black Wilkins, and J.R. Doty. The exhibition is curated by Susan Sherrick, an independent curator based in Nashville.
© Caroline Allison
Among the highlights in Scenes from the South, 1936-2012, will be William Eggleston’s Untitled (Memphis, Green Shower), c. 1972, considered to be one of his most important early dye-transfers prints. He made only a handful of prints of this image, which was taken in his home in Memphis, where he currently lives.
© William Eggleston
William Gedney made two trips to Kentucky, in 1964 and 1972. He stayed in the home of the head of the local mining union in Leatherwood, a town where most of the residents worked in the mines. His 1972 gelatin silver print of a young Kentuck man in a pickup truck in Kentucky depicts what could be the beginning of a hard life. Robert Frank’s 1950s print Teenagers in Tennessee – They Drive the Car shows a happier time, while a pensive young boy peers into a dilapidated barn in The Old South, #2, c. 1954-55, by Ralph Eugene Meatyard.
© William Gedney
The flat landscape of Texas is seen in Peter Sekaer’s 1939 print of a billboard in Amarillo. The art deco sign advertises the Amarillo Hotel for $1.50 to $3.00 a night. Joel Meyerowitz made a number of road trips to the South. His 1963 image Signs in the South, 1963, shows signs for “strawberry’s” as well as Coca-Cola (“Enjoy That Refreshing New Feeling”) and “patent medicine.” Caroline Allison, an emerging artist based in Nashville, photographed the TVA Kingston Fossil Plant in 2010. The coal-burning power plant, located just outside Kingston, Tennessee, was the scene of a 2008 spill, which damaged 300 acres of surrounding land.
'DIFFUSION' CARDIFF INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Diffusion Festival, Cardiff
01.05.2013 - 31.05.2013
And Where are We Now? This was the question we asked artists, cultural producers, curators and programmers to address with their contributions to Diffusion 2013, and the one we will be exploring with audiences and participants.
© Geoff Charles
Geoff Charles (1909 – 2002) occupies a unique position in a tradition of press photography and photojournalism within Wales. Born in Brymbo, Wrexham, Charles’ worked for newspapers and magazines such as Wrexham Star, Montgomeryshire Express, Y Cymro and Farmers Weekly. He studied at the University of London, obtaining a first-class diploma in journalism in 1928. Returning to Wales, he was involved in one of the Wrexham Star‘s scoops when he gained access to the lamp room of Gresford Colliery following the disaster there in 1934 to reveal the true number of casualties. During the war years he worked for the War Office to improve farming practices and after the war he again worked for the Welsh language newspaper Y Cymro. Among the notable events he covered include the flooding of the Tryweryn Valley and the village of Capel Celyn and the related protests in the early 60s. Above all, his archive combines some of the major social and political changes in Wales with a far greater account of quotidian life. It is in the celebration of the seemingly ordinary and overlooked moments that his photography becomes distinctive as social and historical document. The National Library of Wales houses the Geoff Charles Collection, which consists of over 120,000 negatives.
© Holly Davey
‘Nothing Is What It Is Because Everything Is What It Isn’t’ is a site-specific photographic installation exploring the stairwell and landing space in the Museum’s contemporary galleries. Holly Davey has photographed the space to create a digital collage in which the stairwell is reformed, repeated and replayed within the original architecture. This reimagining of the stairwell creates a feeling of disorientation, encouraging the viewer to question their experience and understanding of this functional, transitional space. Nothing Is What It Is… was commissioned by Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales following an open call for artist submissions in 2012.
People encounter photographic images daily not only in newspapers, magazines, on TV and in advertising, but also through online channels, mobile phone applications and social networking sites. We live in a time of image glut, and with the boundaries increasingly blurred between artist and audience, amateur and professional, we might ask and where is photography now? The world has never before been so visualised, yet the nature and meaning of photography and its status in art has never been so hotly debated.
© Edgar Martins
In 2010 and 2011, Edgar Martins gained exclusive access to 20 power plants located across Portugal. Many were built between the 1950s and 1970s, a time of hopeful prospects for rapid economic growth and social change. ‘The Time Machine’ records objects and spaces whose grand and progressive designs testify to the scope and ambition of the vision they were built to serve. Martins’ photographs recall science-fiction and in an unavoidable field of nostalgia, characterise a suspended time; that of the modern. In recovering a past of exciting technological innovation and optimistic belief in the future, ‘The Time Machine’ speaks not just about the generation of power but also of dreams and technological utopias. This exhibition was funded by Fundação EDP and the international tour is supported by The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (UK branch) & Instituto Camões (Portugal).
Diffusion 2013 examines these cultural shifts and different approaches to artistic production, presentation and distribution. We look at the relationship in photographic art between traditional and new hybrid forms and their place within contemporary visual culture. Diffusion 2013 offers a space for artists, cultural agents and audiences to share experience and creative endeavour, to begin to make sense of a world where almost anyone can and will become a photographer and distribute their images within online communities – a society in which our experience of time and space has dramatically changed.
© Helen Sear
‘Lure’ is a major exhibition of new work by Helen Sear. One of Wales’ most important and insightful artists, Sear’s practice can be characterised by her exploration of the crossover between photography and fine art, her focus on the natural world and the startling beauty of her work. From seemingly simple subjects – a frozen pond, straw bales in a field, wild flowers – Sear makes artworks of great power that explore ideas of seeing and perception.
At a deeper level, the festival interrogates our position in Europe and its wider global ramifications. Diffusion 2013 highlights the role of photography, as arguably the world’s most democratic and visible medium, to record contemporary life as lived, to represent urban and rural experience, and to imagine a future orientated new European Identity. Above all, Diffusion 2013 is a celebration of photography and the photographic image, in all its forms. Whether created, published, exhibited, collected or distributed in a physical or virtual way, the photograph has the power to inspire and provoke reaction, to reflect our own experience and that of society evolving around us.
© Diffusion Festival
CHRISTIAN MARCLAY AT FRAENKEL GALLERY
‘Things I’ve Heard’
Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
29.03.2013 - 25.05.2013
Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to announce Things I’ve Heard, an exhibition of color photographs by artist and composer Christian Marclay. Comprised of approximately fifty works spanning the years 1994 to 2009, Things I’ve Heard will be accompanied by a fully illustrated book published by Fraenkel Gallery in association with Paula Cooper Gallery.
Photography has been an integral element of Marclay’s practice since his earliest years as an artist. With an eye keenly (and paradoxically) attuned to sound-related subject matter, his photographs function both as source material for his works in other media as well as sophisticated, subtle works of art on their own terms. With an appearance of casual snapshots, Marclay’s photographs evidence a keen awareness of the history of the medium, particularly of Atget, Evans, and Eggleston. His travels have provided the artist with a rich array of sound-related subject matter; a bin of second-hand record albums in Michigan, a marching band outside a window in London, a painted ear on a brick wall in Montreal, a “Honk If You Love Silence” bumper sticker in Chicago, for example. While Marclay has exhibited small groupings of his photographs in the past, this is the first exhibition dedicated solely to his camera-related photography.
Christian Marclay is widely recognized as one of the most adventurous artists of his generation. “The Clock,” his 24-hour film comprised of thousands of time-related clips from the history of cinema, has attracted viewers around the globe, and will be on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from April 6th through June 2nd, 2013.
Christian Marclay is a London and New York based visual artist and composer whose innovative work explores the juxtaposition between sound recording, photography, video and film. Born in California in 1955 and raised in Geneva, Switzerland. His mother was American so he held a double nationality. He studied at the Ecole Supérieure d’Art Visuel from 1977–1980 in Geneva, Switzerland. From 1977–1980 he studied sculpture at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. He also studied as a visiting scholar at Cooper Union in New York in 1978. As a performer and sound artist Christian Marclay has been experimenting, composing and performing with phonograph records and turntables since 1979 to create his unique “theater of found sound,” influenced by Marcel Duchamp. Christian Marclay offers a unique, fresh and innovative voice that has inspired an entire generation of musicians, artists and theorists.
Marclay has collaborated with musicians such as John Zorn, Elliott Sharp, Fred Frith, Zeena Parkins, Shelley Hirsh, Christian Wolff, Butch Morris, Otomo Yoshihide, Arto Lindsay, and Sonic Youth among many others. A dadaist DJ and filmmaker, his installations and video/film collages display provocative musical and visual landscapes and have been included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art New York, Venice Biennale, Centre Pompidou Paris, Kunsthaus Zurich, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Christian Marclay has been said to be the first non-rap DJ to make an art form out of the turntable, treating the instrument as a means to rip songs apart, not bridge them together. Marclay began his musical exploration that mixes sound and art with performance using turntables in 1979 as a student. Recycled Records (1980–1986), was one of his early peices. The work took fragmented and reassembled records which became objects that could be played, distorting tone and sound. Body Mix (1991–92), is a series he produced that wove together album covers, creating Postmodern critques of music and visual culture. One example is Deutsche Grammaphon conductors with the infamous legs of Tina Turner, bringing to light Surrealist ‘Exquisite Corpses.’ A key thread throughout Christian Marclay’s work is this transformation of musical objects into visual commentary on culture.
© Fraenkel Gallery | Christian Marclay
