Two exhibitions
dal 12/5/2005 al 25/6/2005
Segnalato da
12/5/2005
Two exhibitions
Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
New photographs and sculpture by Darren Almond. Inspired by the work of Joseph Brodsky, a Russian poet who spent seven years in a Siberian labor camp before his 1972 exile and emigration to the U. S., Almond has made an exhibition of stark contrasts. Weegee: Idiot Box. The artist became famous for the documentary images of New York City he made prior to 1945. This show will include 9 vintage black & white photographs the artist shot of a television screen around 1965 and the short film Idiot Box
Matthew Marks Gallery at his gallery at 523 West 24th Street.
Darren Almon
Matthew Marks Gallery at his gallery at 521 West 21st Street
Weegee: Idiot Box
Matthew Marks is pleased to announce an exhibition of new photographs and sculpture by Darren Almond at his gallery at 523 West 24th Street. This will be the first exhibition of the artist's work in New York in four years.
Inspired by the work of Joseph Brodsky, a Russian poet who spent seven years in a Siberian labor camp before his 1972 exile and emigration to the United States, Darren Almond has made an exhibition of stark contrasts. The gallery will be installed with images of color photographs of great lushness and black & white photographs of frozen desolation, while the center of the space will be occupied by a wall-mounted aluminum plaque with the original Russian text of Brodsky's A Part of Speech, a poem about the memory of his lost homeland.
Almond traveled to Siberia to make the black and white photographs, images of a damaged wooden bridge along the world's northernmost railway, built to access the Norilsk nickel mines. This dilapidated bridge marks the site of a mass grave, as an estimated 60,000 prisoners died during the railways construction. The bridge is considered to be an unofficial monument to the loss of life: bodies were literally used as ballast.
The color photographs are part of the artist’s ongoing Fullmoon series, made using long exposures at night during a full moon. The artist relies entirely on his own memory of the daytime landscape to produce these pictures: after visiting the site during the day, he returns at night to position his camera in complete darkness. The resulting images are lush and vividly colored and bear an unusual, almost magical light. Almond writes, "the dark of night generates solitude as no one is around, so the images themselves reveal a certain emptiness of human spirit. For me they provide a point of entry into memory." In the past, Almond has made his Fullmoon pictures on the preferred sites of some of the great artists of the 19th century, including Constable, Turner, Caspar David Friedrich, and Jackson Pollock. To make this new group, the artist traveled to the California Gold Coast, the same sites that Carleton Watkins photographed more than 100 years ago. Between both sets of landscape we can find the position that influenced Brodsky and his cold war exile in the United States.
Darren Almond (b. 1971) lives and works in London. This will be his third exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery. Almond participated in the 2003 Venice Biennale and has had one-person museum exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Zurich; de Appel Centre for Contemporary Art in Amsterdam; the Tate Britain, London; K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf; and the Lentos Kunstmuseum in Linz, Austria.
Darren Almond will be on view at the Matthew Marks Galleries, 523 West 24th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues) through June 25, 2005. Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, from 11:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M..
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Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Weegee: Idiot Box, the next exhibition at his gallery at 521 West 21st Street.
Weegee (1899-1968) became famous for the documentary images of New York City he made prior to 1945, though little of the work he made in the last two decades of his life has received significant critical attention. This exhibition follows the gallery's 2000 exhibition of Weegee distortions and is a further investigation of Weegee's lesser-known later work.
The exhibition will include nine vintage black & white photographs the artist shot of a television screen around 1965. It will also include the short film Idiot Box, in which all nine photographs appear as stills. These photographs depict station logos for CBS and NBC; the labor leader Michael J. Quill being interviewed; and the title frame of various shows, including What's My Line, The Ed Sullivan Show, and Candid Camera.
Weegee's film Idiot Box is a five-minute montage of still and moving images with a wide variety of subjects, including advertisements for aspirin and brassieres, a poster soliciting donors for a sperm bank, a group of rowdy chimpanzees, the Empire State Building, and a prisoner strapped into an electric chair. As with much of Weegee's later photography, many of the images in the film are distorted using lenses of his own invention. In the film, Weegee's distortions come to life: the Leaning Tower of Pisa undulates, nude women with multiple breasts lounge about, and the Mona Lisa smiles and winks at the viewer. The photographs included in the exhibition appear interspersed throughout the film.
The phrase "idiot box" was coined in 1959, and by 1965 over 92% of American households had at least one television. Weegee's familiarity with this phenomenon, coupled with his prescient use of Pop imagery, gives these works lasting significance. Weegee, working in a medium that was barely considered art, received virtually no recognition for this kind of experimental work, to which he devoted most of his energies throughout the 1950s and 1960s. When he died, in 1968, the artist was living in a single room on West 47th Street.
Weegee: Idiot Box will be on view at the Matthew Marks Gallery at 521 West 21st Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues) through June 25, 2005.
Hours: Thursday and Friday, 1:00 to 6:00 P.M., and Saturday from 11:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M.
For further information or reproductions please contact Sabrina Buell at 212-243-0200.
Image: Darren Almon