THRESHOLDS

Posted on 2013-02-25

This exhibition explores the relationship between truth, fiction and fantasy within documentary photography. The artists included in Thresholds have, in different ways, made work that explicitly address these aspects of documentary photography practice.

Sophie Ristelhueber’s photographs, Eleven Blow Ups, are at first glance instantly recognisable as scenes from a contemporary conflict; familiar to us from the proliferation of images presented in the media. These photographs are in fact elaborate fictions, digitally manipulated by the artist.

Peter Watkins and Tereza Zelenkova also refer to the fictional potential of the documentary photograph. For An Index of Time the artists collaborated on a project about the Byci Skala cave in the Czech Republic, a rich source of local mythology and folklore. During the process of documenting the cave, the photographers were struck by the heavy influence that these tales had on their work.

Maja Daniels documents twins Monette and Mady as they go about their daily routine in Paris. The women live a performative existence in which they pose as the mirror image to each other, rarely appearing in public separately and never without identical clothes, hair and accessories.

Stephen Gill’s series Hackney Wick, also shows the ability of photography to transform the everyday into a theatre of the surreal. His photographs represent the area of London in which Gill lives.

Luke Stephenson is interested in documenting subcultures within British culture. In his series An Incomplete Dictionary of Showbirds, Stephenson has photographed birds commonly kept as domestic pets in the U.K. that are entered into ‘showbird’ competitions.

Exhibition runs from March 15th to April 26th, 2013

Belfast Exposed
The Exchange Place
23 Donegall Street
Belfast
BT1 2FF

www.belfastexposed.org

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JAN DIBBETS

Posted on 2013-02-25

Jan Dibbets has been a major figure in the international art world for more than forty years. Initially trained as a painter at the fine arts academy in Tilburg, Jan Dibbets turned to photography at the end of the 1960s, and such early series as “Perspective Corrections” became one of the essential foundations of Conceptual Art. To this day his work revolves around questions that pertain to the structure of photography and the mechanisms of perception, “what we see” as opposed to “what we know.”

For this first exhibition at the gallery, Jan Dibbets will show for the first time a new series of large-scale photographs, New Colorstudies 1976/2012. Using negatives shot in the 1970s that were quite direct explorations of depicting color without an obvious structure, these new works use a large scale unavailable at that time to create almost painterly monochrome works. All are close-cropped details of car hoods – “flat and shiny like a photograph” – on which might be reflected sky and trees, photographs that are simultaneously as abstract as they are precise representation. The found industrial color of the cars, reproduced with the equally industrial chemical color of film chemistry, in the 70s Dibbets left unaltered; but in this new series he has often manipulated the color, bringing us back to the questions of representation and reality that are at the core of Dibbets’s work.

Exhibition runs through till March 29th, 2013

Galerie Nelson-Freeman
59 rue Quincampoix
75004 Paris
France

www.galerienelsonfreeman.com

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RICHARD BILLINGHAM – RAY’S A LAUGH

Posted on 2013-02-25

A major show about the Black Country and some of its characters.
Turner Prize nominee Richard Billingham’s, ‘Ray’s a laugh’ consists of photographs Richard took of his father Ray and his mother Liz, in Cradley Heath. These are photographs with real integrity drawing out the troubled yet deeply human and touching personalities of his alcoholic father Ray, and obese, heavily-tattooed mother, Liz.

Exhibition runs through till May 6th, 2013

The Public
New Street
West Bromwich
West Midlands
B70 7PG

www.thepublic.com

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