GORDON PARKS – THE NEW TIDE EARLY WORK 1940-1950

Posted on 2019-11-11

“A guy who takes a chance, who walks the line between the known and unknown, who is unafraid of failure, will succeed.” – Gordon Parks

Gordon Parks was part of what author Richard Wright called “the new tide” of African Americans who were pressing for respect and racial equality in the 1940s. Organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in collaboration with The Gordon Parks Foundation, Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940-1950 explores the early years of Parks’ career as an influential photographer who captured the essence of the civil rights movement in addition to breaking barriers for African Americans.

From his fashion photographs to his thoughtful depictions of American life, Parks used the camera as his tool for proclaiming the value of an American community built on freedom and equality. This exhibition offers an expansive and intimate look at how this pioneering artist became one of the most influential photographers of his day.

Opposite – Washington, D.C. Government charwoman (1912 – 2006)

Exhibition runs through to December 29th, 2019

Amon Carter Museum of American Art
3501 Camp Bowie Blvd
Fort Worth
76107 TX

www.cartermuseum.org

   Tweet

POLLY BROWN – AIRPORTALS

Posted on 2019-11-04

British photographer POLLY BROWN’s new conceptually led show AIRPORTALS revolves around the politically charged process of airport security checks. Taking photographs at these points of migration is strictly forbidden, however the x-ray machines used at them can leave their mark on undeveloped photographic film – fogging and damaging the rolls, creating an unintended and abstract documentation. Three years in the making and Brown’s first solo show in The Netherlands, this exhibition brings together photographs and abstracted mark making which capture these ghostly echoes. Shot solely on damaged x-rayed film AIRPORTALS presents a forbidden portrait of these tightly controlled liminal zones in a beautiful and haunting body of work.

Opposite – Touchy, 2019

Exhibition runs through to November 15th, 2019

We Folk Presents
Prinsengracht 371 B
1016 HK
Amsterdam

www.amsterdamart.com
www.wefolk.com

   Tweet

MAROESJKA LAVIGNE – LOST LANDS

Posted on 2019-11-04

After traveling to the pristine lands of Iceland and Namibia, Maroesjka Lavigne’s interest in the geological and aesthetic qualities of our earth have grown, specifically in the spectrum of colors it demonstrates. Robert Mann Gallery presents Lost Lands, the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery that opens in conjunction with her newly released monograph, Someone, Somewhere, Sometime.

Fascinated by the earth’s changing terrain, Lavigne travelled to locations including regions of Argentina, Chile, China, and America’s West where she looked at color and form to capture the passing of time in environments that may soon disappear – leaving only traces behind. In the Painted Hills, Painted Desert, Petrified Forest, among other locations, Lavigne studied the struggles of the landscape that are evident in the collision of tectonic plates, the composition of a volcano’s eruption and the tactility and texture of polychromatic mountain ranges which are shaped by history. For the artist, nature is unconquerable, and all around us. It can be seen in a narrow dried up ravine finding its way through a pastel canvas of rust-colored hills, or in the flutter of a majestic pink spoonbill against a dark rocky bottomed pool.

Opposite – Yellow bushes, Argentina, 2017

Exhibition runs through to December 21st, 2019

Robert Mann Gallery
525 West 26th Street, Floor 2
New York
10001 NY

www.robertmann.com

   Tweet

STEPHEN WILKES – DAY TO NIGHT

Posted on 2019-11-04

One of the most aesthetically complex and rewarding photographic projects of the last decade is Stephen Wilkes’s “Day to Night” photographic series. In Wilkes’s own words, he comments: “Day to Night has been a 10-year personal journey to capture fundamental elements of our world through the hourglass of a single day. It is a synthesis of art and science, an exploration of time, memory, and history through the 24-hour rhythms of our daily lives.”

In the 16th-century, a narrative landscape painting that much inspired and intrigued Wilkes at the age of fourteen, The Harvesters by Pieter Bruegel, would rouse a question for the future photographer, “what exactly does art accomplish?”

Painting can be a vehicle with the ability to transport you to another world, transcending time and space. When a moving train in silent motion pictures replaced the still image, making crowds jump from their seats about a hundred years ago, there was a change in technology that altered our perception of reality. Stephen Wilkes’s work taps into this fascination, alluding to the almost magical possibilities of capturing a complex world with a camera. In a time when digital manipulation is often used to reshape reality in photographs, Wilkes’s meticulous capturing of light moving through the landscape, presenting a day in its entirety, elevates the potential of what is real. Most significantly, it gives the viewer a new way to perceive the passing of time and reality.

Opposite – Washington Square Park, NYC, Day to Night, 2009

Exhibition runs through to December 14th, 2019

JL Modern
324 Worth Avenue
Palm Beach
33480 FL

jlmoderngallery.com

   Tweet

EMMET GOWIN – THE NEVADA TEST SITE

Posted on 2019-10-28

Since 1980, renowned American photographer Emmet Gowin has explored both the natural and man-made alteration of the earth’s surface from an airborne perspective. Finding that “from the air, places and subjects usually forbidden or inaccessible were now fully visible, with a scope and wholeness that a close-up or ground view could never provide,” he has created formally abstract and luminous compositions of the volcanic devastation of Washington’s Mount St. Helens, the chemical contamination of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, pivot irrigation agriculture in Kansas, the chemo-petrol industries of the Czech Republic, and most recently, the Spanish province of Granada.

Following a nearly decade-long pursuit with the U.S. Department of Energy, Gowin secured permission to make aerial photographs of the Nevada National Security Test Site in 1996, and remains the only photographer granted official and continued access to the reservation. Located about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, this area of desert and mountainous terrain sustained over 900 nuclear detonations between 1951 and 1992, creating a landscape at the Nevada Test Site like no other on earth.

Opposite – Subsidence Craters, Looking Southeast From Area 8, Yucca Flat, Nevada Test Site, 1996

Exhibition runs through to December 21st, 2019

Pace/MacGill Gallery
540 West 25th St
New York
10022 NY

www.pacemacgill.com

   Tweet

SALLY MANN – REMEMBERED LIGHT & LANDSCAPES

Posted on 2019-10-28

Though her subject matter has varied over the years, Mann’s work consistently retains a fascination with both material and symbolic notions of place, in particular the American South.

From the late 1990s into the 2000s, Mann honed in on her relationship with the southern landscape by taking photographs in Mississippi and Louisiana for her Deep South series (2005), as well as Civil War battlefields for Last Measure (2000). Georgia and Deep South – on view at Jackson Fine Art – hail from this period and explore what Mann has called the “corner posts of my conscious being: memory, loss, time, and love…the stage on which these are played out is always the Southern landscape; terrible in its beauty, in its indifference.”

Opposite – Untitled (Angled Light) 1999-2000

Exhibition runs through to December 21st, 2019

Jackson Fine Art
3115 East Shadowlawn Avenue
Atlanta
30305 GA

www.jacksonfineart.com

   Tweet