craigslist and 100 ways to kneel and kiss the ground: two exhibitions opening at Civilian Art Projects
On Exhibit:
Friday, March 21 - Saturday, April 26, 2008
Gallery Hours:
Wednesday - Saturday, 2 to 6pm and by appointment
IN THE MAIN GALLERY:
craigslist
click here for essay by Andrea Pollan
craigslist explores how four artists utilize this renowned community website as a conceptual component in their artistic practice. The exhibition features works by the artist team Joseph Dumbacher & John Dumbacher, Jason Horowitz, and Jason Zimmerman and is co-curated by Jayme McLellan, Director of Civilian Art Projects and Andrea Pollan, Director of Curator's Office. An opening reception is scheduled for Friday, March 21 from 7 - 9 pm. An essay by Andrea Pollan will accompany the exhibition.
The artist team of Joseph and John Dumbacher solicit willing models on craigslist.org to meet them in movie theaters where they create haunting and identity-obscuring photographic portraits. Similarly, Jason Horowitz advertises for models to pose in his studio where he shoots extreme close-ups of their body parts and then explodes the scale of the image to create an unsettling nexus of anonymous portraiture and landscape. Jason Zimmerman exploits images posted by users on craigslist.org as his raw material. He creates digital photo albums of hundreds of individuals who publicize their sexual availability by uploading images of their naked bodies but with their facial identities distorted or obscured.
Jason Horowitz is represented by Curator's Office. Jason Zimmerman is represented by Civilian Art Projects.
IN THE PROJECT SPACE:
100 ways to kneel and kiss the ground
click here for essay by Kristen Hileman
Concurrently on exhibition with craigslist is 100 ways to kneel and kiss the ground, photography by Kate MacDonnell, curated by Jayme McLellan with an essay by Kristen Hileman, a Washington D.C.-based curator working at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
Kate's photography is inspired by and departs from the new topographic school of photography and its prolific photo-documentation of the suburbs during the 1970s and 1980s. Inspired by such photographers as Lewis Baltz, Chauncey Hare, Bill Owens, Robert Adams and Catherine Wagner, Kate builds upon and departs into the documentation of a more personal environment. "Born into this changed landscape and growing up with its visual language.my images are often diaristic, shot within domestic interiors or places that I know intimately," says the artist. "I look critically and with awe at ordinary, seemingly aesthetically devoid spaces. My domestic interiors are a celebration of the ordinary, of a calm or soothing or just familiar place that does not have the velocity or multiplicity of the outside world. If there is clutter, it is the domestic clutter that dust has comfortably settled upon. If there is life, it is plant life that grows little by little -- imperceptibly. If there is human life it is already fixed in time as a photograph, now rephotographed. Though these pictures celebrate the banal, they also act as reminders that something, many things, are happening outside of the frame.
According to Hileman, "Kate takes us beyond the classic 'decisive moment' of photography to an instant that seems impossible." Precisely mediated and re-mediated which Hileman discusses in her text, Kate's work reveals a patient, watchful eye that connects these moments in a way that seems to slow our pace and allow for space and time to consider. Instead of jumping from image to the next, as one might read a narrative or watch a documentary, each image uniquely holds the viewer, providing a chance to weigh its power and connection to a larger whole.
Please click here for the full press release in PDF format