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Tseng Kwong Chi
Ambiguous Ambassador
January
6 – March 5,
2005
This
exhibition will feature the expeditionary self-portraits of this world-renowned
photographer, performance artist, and art world socialite. Featuring
tongue-in-cheek images of the artist posing as a Chinese Communist dignitary
or "Ambiguous Ambassador" in a world utterly alien to his
persona; complete with the classic Mao suit, dark glasses and identity
tag stamped "Slut for Art". By placing his character in stereotypically
touristy sites around the world, Kwong Chi addresses issues ranging
from personal identity, to cultural identity, to finding one's place
in the world, to the exploration of the nature of tourism, tourist photography,
and landscape painting.
Kwong Chi’s work has been exhibited in many solo shows, including
a major retrospective at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson,
which has traveled to numerous museums. His work is included in many
public collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
the New York Public Library, the New School in New York, the Museum
of Fine Arts, Houston, the Walker Art Center, the Wellesley College
Art Museum, the Los Angeles County Art Museum, the Hallmark Collection
and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. His work continues to be included
in many solo, group and traveling exhibitions. |
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Michael Garlington
PORTRAITS
FROM THE BELLY OF THE WHALE
March 17 May 7, 2005
A wholesome and artistic upbringing in Petaluma. California, combined
with regular contact with the hippies, poultry farmers, metal fabricators,
bleeding hearts, and wanna-be artists of the Bay Area was a ‘David
Lynch meets "Leave it to Beaver"’ backdrop that served
as early inspiration for thia young artist. Garlington spent countless
hours in the darkroom printing the works of some of San Francisco's
finest photographers — and at the age of 17, he began photographing;
documenting the world around him in all its splendor, monotony, degeneracy,
banality and vice.
Garlington tours the country in his “Photo Car” —
literally a Volkswagen covered with his photographs. He shoots portraits
of whatever speaks to him - from a contortionist to a fast food worker,
from the disabled to a young patriot, his work is about ordinary Americans
leading ordinary lives, yet there is something awry. Inside the work
is a deeply felt affection for humanity in all its permutations and
expressions, in all its horror and triviality. The resulting body
of work offers a critical, offbeat, and humorous view of the United
States —a portrait of the “belly of the whale.”
Garlington’s work is in the collections of Yale University,
Dartmouth College, Mt Holyoke College, the di Rosa Preserve in Napa
County, and in the permanent collection of the Minnesota Institute
of Arts where he will have a one-man show in 2007. He has done more
than 20 one-man shows. Garlington is currently working on a series
of California-Mexican working families living in trailers, struggling
for a piece of a promised dream, and is planning his fourth cross-county
photo expedition in 2005. |
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Esther
Bubley
May 12 - July 2, 2005
Stephen Cohen Gallery announces an exhibition of
black and white images created by one of the true pioneers of photojournalism,
Esther Bubley. In looking at the breadth of her long career as a photojournalist,
one cannot escape the fact that she worked very well with people —
putting their humanity front and center — whether it was a soldier
sleeping in a bus station waiting to return home or workers repairing
the Brooklyn Bridge.
Born in Phillips, Wisconsin, Bubley (19211998) became interested
in photography at an early age and left home in her late teens to
study at the Minneapolis School of Design. Upon completing a one-year
program, and a brief stint at Vogue, Bubley moved to Washington, D.C.
in 1941 where wartime jobs for women were plentiful to earn a living
doing the one thing she loved most photography.
During the initial months following her move to Washington, Bubley
ventured throughout the nation’s capitol photographing wartime subjects.
These honest and austere images of life on the homefront eventually
caught the eye of legendary Roy Stryker who recruited Bubley to work
with him on his ongoing document of American life, a project which
he started at the FSA, moved to the Office of War Information (OWI)
and continued after the war under the auspices of the Standard Oil
of New Jersey (SONJ). Notable among the SONJ stories are two Bubley
projects, the 1945 portrayal of the oil town Tomball, Texas and the
1947 “Bus Story” which explored the role of long-distance bus travel
in rapidly-changing American life. Images from these stories are included
in this exhibition along with other significant work from from the
40s and early ‘50s.
Bubley also produced numerous photo-essays, several cover stories
for LIFE, and a major piece called "How America Lives" for Ladies'
Home Journal, a celebrated series which ran intermittently between
1948 and 1960.
Her photographs are in many private and corporate collections, including
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, the National Portrait Gallery,
George Eastman House, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and
the Library of Congress.
The show will take place in conjunction with the publication of “Esther
Bubley on Assignment” published by Aperture, which will be available
for purchase at the gallery. |
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Nick Brandt
July 7 August 27, 2005
Lions, cheetahs, rhinos, hippos, giraffes and chimpanzees populate
large-scale images that appear both timeless and fleeting, solidly
real and other-worldly, silent but eloquent, nearly human and yet
distinctly, undeniably primal. Brandt is an artist and a skilled
technician, using the light and the sky to tell his story and discreet
visual effects to enhance the emotional depth of each image. His
work is emotionally resonant, leaving the viewer with a longing for
this pure wilderness that is all too rapidly disappearing.
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Fredric Roberts
Humanitas
A beautiful collection of photography, capturing the essence of humanity
throughout Asia.
"Humanitas" means the development of human virtue in all
its forms, to its fullest extent–a fitting title for this magnificent
collection of photography. Fredric Roberts traveled throughout Asia,
from India to Cambodia, Bhutan to Thailand, Myanmar to China, capturing
with his lens its people in all their understanding, compassion, fortitude,
and honor–a splendid humanity. With an introduction by Arthur
Ollman, Director of the Museum for the Photographic Art, Humanitas
is destined to be a classic in the vein of Edward Steichan's landmark The Family of Man |
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Larry Fink
Under The Surface
September
8 - November 5, 2005
“Under The Surface” is a thought-provoking social commentary that demonstrates Fink’s ability to reveal the intimate in the most crowded of settings and the flaw in the most perfect of scenes. The images are iconic black-and-white photographs of American VIPs, Hollywood players, boxers, runway models and blue collar workers. In a photo of George Plimpton blowing smoke rings to the amusement of a young Ivanka Trump and her model friends, and in a surreptitiously captured shot of rising starlets just outside the glow of the red carpet, as in all his images, Fink illuminates the private and unexpected moments we would otherwise rarely see. A master of the “snapshot aesthetic,” Larry Fink is in the esteemed ranks of Diane Arbus, Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand. |
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Graciela Sacco
Shadows from the South and the North
November
10 - December 24, 2005
Sombras del Sur y del Norte
Photographer, video and installation artist Graciela Sacco produces images that serve as metaphors for some of the most acute problems of contemporary society - famine, homelessness, authoritarianism, poor education and crime. Through her own investigations, Sacco has developed an anti-orthodox method of producing a heliographic image, transferring her original or appropriated photographic images onto a wide range of supports: from paper and canvas to rubber, leather, wood, glass, stone, cardboard, plastic and metal.
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