Due to the nature of Tuesday's tragic events; in respect for the many people who died in the attack at the World Trade Center, there will be no reception for the opening of Barbara Pollack's show at Esso Gallery today Wednesday, September 12, 2001.
Due to the nature of Tuesday's tragic events; in respect for the many
people who died in the attack at the World Trade Center, there will be no
reception for the opening of Barbara Pollack's show at Esso Gallery today
Wednesday, September 12, 2001.
The exhibition will begin "in silence" the next first working day.
We are sorry, shocked and deeply saddened by this tragedy.
Our thoughts go out to the victims and their families.
Much Love to You All.
Jennifer Bacon and Filippo Fossati.
To the generations to come:
the World Trade Center,
building complex in lower Manhattan, New York City,
consisting of seven buildings and a shopping
concourse. It is the world's largest commercial
complex, with many businesses, government
agencies, televions, artist's studio and international
trade organizations. Most
prominent are the 110-story rectangular twin towers,
one rising to 1,362 ft (415 m) and the other to 1,368 ft
(417 m). Designed by Minoru Yamasaki and Emery
Roth, the towers and concourse portion of the center
were completed in 1973 at a cost of $750 million.
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Esso Gallery is pleased to present Dance Party, a new series of photographs
by Barbara Pollack.
Dance Party is a meditation on the social life of contemporary adolescents,
focusing on a series of school dances at a New York City junior high
school.
Dance Party continues Pollack's investigation of photography as it is
habitually used to document every day events. For this series, Pollack
attended dances at her son's junior high school in Chelsea for the past
year and a half, playing the dual role of chaperone and paparazzi to his
group of friends. These intimate photographs capture the preteens playing
amid the disco lights and glitter balls that transform their school
cafeteria into something such as Studio 54 for a night.
Pollack's hallucinatory large-scale color images matches the fragmentary,
transitional identities displayed by her subjects, boys and girls between
12 and 13 years old, not yet ready for adult sexuality, but
entirely caught up with issues of popularity and public attention.
Two of her images ("Dance Party #2" and "Dance Party #3") have been
realized on over-sized light boxes as a subtle criticism of the pervasive
marketing of "youth culture". Other images dwell on the boredom and
alienation evident at the fringe of the party. Pollack's images inject a
sense of disorientation and intrusion into this banal subject matter,
challenging viewers' complacent acceptance of the snapshots
customarily taken by parents to mark their children's rites of passage.
Barbara Pollack lives and works in New York. She has shown extensively
including solo exhibitions at the Holly Solomon Gallery, Thread Waxing
Space and the Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University. A recipient of
fellowships to MacDowell and Ragdale, her work is in the collections of the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of Fine
Arts, Houston, among others. She was commissioned by the New York Public
Library to create a series of portraits of contemporary novelists for the
prestigious Berg Collection of Authors' Archives and recently served as an
artist-in-residence at the Kitchen Center for the Arts in June 2001.
Barbara Pollack teaches at the School of Visual Arts and writes extensively
on photography and contemporary art.
ESSO Gallery and Books
211 West 28th Street
New York NY 10001
tel. (212) 560-9728
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