calendario eventi  :: 

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13/4/2005

Two solo shows

Feigen Contemporary, New York

Paul Hodgson
Apr 14 - May 28, 2005
Main Gallery

The spotlights are dim in Paul Hodgson’s studio, and time flows in reverse. While most photographers’ studios are places of floodlit backdrops and the semblance of novelty, Hodgson’s is more like the hidden quarters of the medium’s unconscious. His photographs excavate earlier imagery from all manner of sources, from unique Old Masters as much as photographs that have been reproduced a thousand times, and put them before us again as if they were fossils. If we recognize something in them, it is because the images are like echo chambers that allow us to hear the past reverberate in the present.

The group portrait Empire directly addresses one of the central themes of Hodgson’s new series. In it he returns to the format of the eighteenth century conversation piece, a genre with a sweet informality but always enough formality to mouth unspoken hierarchies and worldly ambitions. He borrows from Watteau a photograph of the family of Victorian writer John Ruskin holidaying by a frozen lake, and, as throughout the series, from Picasso. The theme of Clean the Floor might seem more opaque, but that also examines a union of art and empire, though this one darker: the models’ gestures might remind one of the figures in Millet’s Gleaners but they might as easily suggest some forced servitude, or images of contemporary brutalities.

Hodgson’s new pictures release these precedents reluctantly. That is because recovering the life of the images buried in them is like reading from a fossil: you can be misled. You might think that Woman Leading Arab, an image of a woman grasping the reins of an Arabian horse, rehearses a painting by Picasso, Boy Leading a Horse, in the Metropolitan Museum: you would be right. You might think the foot washing and the urn motif in The Source is a reference to Ingres’ infamous nude: you would be wrong. But only in a sense, for it is every bit Paul Hodgson’s intention to have us running up blind alleys, of thinking we remember things we don’t, of reading art and history backwards and forwards, and of always listening for the new echoes.

- Morgan Falconer

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Paul Hodgson graduated from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2000 and has since fast gained attention for his large-scale photographs of theatrical tableaux vivants that often draw from the traditions of historical painting. He stages actors in period costume or contemporary clothing with operatic gesture, dramatic lighting and sparse settings against painted, photo or projected backdrops. Hodgson’s allegorical pictures subvert the traditions they represent and disrupt their own implied narrative with a highly ambiguous effect. By reinterpreting paintings from the past with the vernacular of current studio photography he nods to certain old masters, but updates their work with the signs of contemporary social life.

Hodgson uses the elements of ‘classical’ language as a means to enter into his photographs and as suggestive metaphors, yet the scenes are not necessarily meant to evoke sympathy or compassion, nor are they meant to confirm stereotypes. He is more concerned with presenting a picture on a personal level. The results are curiously provocative, awakening forgotten memories and poised somewhere between irony and genuine emotion.

Also on view is Hodgson’s first film, Marie-Therese, 1928, which references the events of a summer Picasso spent with his new mistress. The film informs the many levels of Hodgson’s work, as his cinematic photographs could easily be film stills frozen in time.

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Elizabeth Huey
Front Gallery

Elizabeth Huey, who studied at the New York Studio School and received her M.F.A. from Yale in 2002, paints dream-like narratives of emblematic characters in psychological scenarios and ubiquitous landscape settings. Heroines, a dominatrix, bystanders, and angels share a mythological forest as electronic devices constantly monitor. The innocence of nature and the nature of innocence are interrupted by the architecture of social control and the presence of a home, a church or an institution stationed nearby.

Often patterned after allegorical religious paintings, her pluralistic players are seemingly positioned in some timeless existential theater of the absurd, where fiction meets reality, good meets evil, and power is juxtaposed to vulnerability. Huey’s paintings are highly personal explorations in which she proposes that the external is perhaps best seen by looking inward.

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Central to my work is an obsession with the hydraulics of behavior and emotion. How much power do we have in changing our circumstances and altering our characters? In escaping our inherited narratives? How much does what is internal make a fait accompli of what is external?

The metaphors I employ capitalize on the way brain research has revealed the mind’s plasticity. Rather than being a calcified organ, the mind is now known to be a highly malleable thing. New thought processes—new cognitive acts—can create new neural pathways. Utilizing an image repertoire filled with mystical electronics, melting paths, tangled couples, and shady saviors, my paintings provide a landscape where the literal and fictive worlds dual one another in this fresh dialectic. Neurotransmitters become stairways; winding rivers and thick forests, self sponsored-jails. Phantoms, angels, explosions of color, and hard-pressed scribbles personify the unconscious and its repressed memories, traumas and desires. Attitudes breed manners; emotions orchestrate actions; thoughts produce things. The brain becomes both the mighty Wurlitzer, spinning out false scripts, as well an instrument of emotional emancipation.

The work also examines how the man-made simultaneously edifies and demolishes the natural world. The paintings juxtapose images such as dense woods and metallic machinery to highlight the relationship between the organic and the synthetic. Institutions, such as therapeutic communities and organized religions, are depicted as having the power to manipulate our psyches for both our benefit and detriment. Representations of vast and confined spaces as well as surface play allude to the complex dynamic between power and vulnerability. The paintings frequently depict control centers, ears, and odd light sources as stand-ins for intuitive listening. These characters act as key components for the necessity of distinguishing between good and evil. Ultimately, the paintings make the proposition to look inward.

Elizabeth Huey, 2005

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Image: PAUL HODGSON. Clean the Floor, 2004, pigment print on paper, 50 x 72 inches, edition of 5

Feigen Contemporary
535 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011
Exhibition Hours Tuesday - Saturday, 11:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m.

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