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28/4/2011

Meghan Boody / Jose' Maria Cano

Caprice Horn Gallery, Berlin

Meghan Boody
The Lighthouse Project II: Visitation

Galerie Caprice Horn is pleased to announce the first showing in Europe of Meghan Boody’s complete photographic narrative, “The Lighthouse Project II: Visitation.” The exhibition travels from Affirmation Arts in NYC where it was shown in March.

Meghan Boody was born 1964 in New York City, USA. She received a B.A. from Georgetown University in philosophy and French and apprenticed with the photographer, Hans Namuth for three years where she received her photographic training. Boody began integrating Photoshop and digital compositing into her work in 1994, and is considered one of the first photographers to successfully deploy this new technology. Her large scale, photographic tableaux tell fantastical stories of the human condition and explore the wilderness of the subconscious and the tumult involved in psychological transformation. Her works are in numerous public collections including the collection of Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Fondazione Teseco, Pisa, Italy and Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.

The Lighthouse Project depicts young women and children in heroic landscapes and period interiors. Vacillating between girlhood and adulthood, the subjects undertake the exploration of this interior drama with Boody’s signature insight and sensitivity. Their precarious, psychic journey is underscored by the works’ shifting perspectives. Past and present, reality and fantasy weave in and out of Boody’s disjunctive narratives, which capture the state of the adolescent mind in flux.

Using the first lines of Victorian novels as titles, the story revolves around a young girl, the inmate of an orphanage which is situated near a legendary lighthouse. After a catastrophic fire which destroys the institute (depicted in the seminal piece, “Night is generally my time for walking”), the series follows the child as she wanders through mystical and strange lands towards the beacon of light. Here she encounters other strays and together they investigate their unfolding reality. Fear alternating with enthusiasm drives these individuals who never seem to forget the pathos of their existence as orphans. As the natural elements transform them, the landscape becomes a central character and a palette for the projection of the inner life and transmutation of this young woman and her cohorts.

Boody creates each piece through the compositing of hundreds of Photoshopped layers over the course of several months. This multi-layered approach extends to the lacquered frames studded with sculptural relief that Boody designed for the series. Trios of meticulously carved creatures in metamorphosis slither and writhe across the moldings. These beasts along with a horse’s eye embedded in the surface give the impression that the frames are sentient and alive – like protective gargoyles keeping watch over the images.

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José María Cano
The Wall Street One Hundred – the Murdoch Principle

The Spanish artist José María Cano (born in 1959 in Madrid, Spain) focused in his new series on the hundred most well-known and important people of the economy and finance sector – The Wall Street One Hundred.

His artistic career began in 2002 after a period as band member of the group Mecano. He already started with drawing at the age of ten and he went to Rafael Hidalgo de Caviedes Academy followed by Artaquio Academy to prepare himself for his subsequent architecture studies. In 2004 his first exhibition opened at Craig Robins’ Space in Miami, Florida. Cano has been presented internationally in cities such as London, Madrid, Moscow and Shanghai.

In large-size works he portrayed the leading personalities of the economy and finance world such as Rupert Murdoch, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Roman Abramovic, Josef Ackermann et al. The portraits of these prominent and influential characters are based on the business profile of each person in the “Wall Street Journal”. In addition, the characters are framed by text fragments as a reference to these profiles. Journals and magazines are commonly considered to be obsolete and antiquated the next day. However by being preserved in wax for posterity, these personalities become a sort of an “eternal monument”. Accordingly, The Wall Street One Hundred are often described as “wax mausoleum” or “exclusive member’s club”. Thereby the question rises why people feel the desire to assemble apparently famous, influential and important persons as statues in a cabinet. Do they serve as a person with whom they identify or as a role model? Wax works seem finally to take up today’s place of the mausoleums of former days.

In the series The Wall Street One Hundred, the perceived level of power by these men plays a key role because it interacts directly with the power of the other members of the “group of hundred“ – thus the significance by some can rise or fall. Cano impressively reveals the influence and the power of economy and politics in his portraits, but also its fragility. It is conspicuous that there are barely women among the most important business leaders. Considering current discussions about demands for a women quota in German economy, this series is marked by a high topicality.

By using paraffin-wax and the technique of encaustic the large-size works are characterized by an exceptionally depth adding a haptic quality. Hugo Rifkind who deals with celebrities and politicians in his column, underlines this point in the British Times with the following statement: “Cano’s pictures surface have a translucent depth so that they are more like sculptures than paintings”. At first sight, his works are kept in black and white but if you get closer to the works you realize blue and pink pigments which finally create this black-and-white-effect. The encaustic is an artistic technique which has a clearly longer tradition than oil painting and had its peak in Greek-Roman Antiquity. Coloured pigments are added to hot wax and then are applied to or sprayed on chosen surfaces such as canvases. The artists of the past believed that encaustic is able to materialize their thoughts and then to burn them with fire i nto the surface.

Simultaneously to The Wall Street One Hundred Cano painted “mountains” and in this series he visualized in an artistic manner the performance of the financial markets and the stocks of specific companies. These painted statistics represent the “new” landscapes a painter should paint according to Cano’s opinion. Following The Wall Street One Hundred he also realized the series The Wall Street Wax Museum in which celebrities and prominent politicians are in focus such as Queen Elisabeth II. or even Barack Obama whose portrait was directly given as a present to the President of the USA.

Image: Meghan Boody

Vernissage 29 April 2011, 6-9pm

Caprice Horn Gallery
Rudi-Dutschke-Str. 26, Berlin
Opening hrs: tue-sat 11am - 6pm
GALLERY WEEKEND SPECIAL OPENING HRS
Fr., 29.4., 4-9pm, Sat. + Sun., 30.4. + 1.5., 11am-7pm
free entry

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