LAURA MCPHEE: DESERT CHRONICLE

Exhibition Dates: March 7th - April 13th, 2013

Closing reception with the artist: Friday, April 5th, 6:00 - 8:00pm

Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10:00am - 6:00pm

Bonni Benrubi Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by Laura McPhee. Desert Chronicle is built upon McPhee's work in 2010-12 documenting landscapes in Idaho, Utah, and Arizona. McPhee's images are at once lyrical displays of vast desert regions and complex explorations of our role in their ecological fate.

Desert Chronicle will feature thirteen color photographs, in dimensions as great as forty-eight square feet. Made with a large-format view camera, these striking images envelop time, both geologic and human. A serpentine river has cut a deep incision in the land. A gold mine on the edge of the Black Rock Desert has cut a deep incision in the land, exposing its ruddy interior. A still-life from the edge of an alkali flat reveals surprising fragments of human presence -- machine parts, a penny, desert-varnished tin cans, a tiny plastic toy among shards of glass and rust. Collectively, the pictures evoke contemplation of our use of the earth and to what ends -- unintended consequences of humanity's attempts to control and manage nature. A painterly meditation on our material lives, the images depict our paradoxical efforts as we variously protect, alter, and exploit the land.

Born in Manhattan, Laura McPhee grew up in central New Jersey. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Princeton University and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Rhode Island School of Design. Her work, which ranges from landscape to still life to portrait, is widely exhibited nationally and internationally. McPhee was awarded a Fulbright Scholars Fellowship in 1998 for work in India and Sri Lanka, and in 2003-05 a residency in Idaho from Alturas Foundation. She was also awarded, in 1995, a New England Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship in 1993. Her photographs are included in the permanent collections of many museums, including the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. She is currently a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and lives in Brookline, MA.

John Fitch

John Fitch

August 4, 1917 – October 31, 2012

War hero

Sailor

Engineer

Inventor

Entrepreneur

Race car driver

Lime Rock fixture

Russell Means

Russell Means

November  10,  1939 – October  22, 2012

Mitaku Ojasin  -  we are all related

© Jim Mone

Jon Strymish branches out with “TURN: Spring Leaves” photo exhibit

Turn
Photographs by Jon Strymish

AVIARY Gallery & Art Boutique

48 South Street 

Jamaica Plain, MA 02130

www.aviarygallery.com

“Never say there is nothing beautiful in the world anymore. There is always something to make you wonder in the shape of a tree, the trembling of a leaf.”

- Albert Schweitzer

Long before he famously put together “These Are From Negatives In My Car,” a rock and folk photography exhibit printed from negatives salvaged from a vehicle so filthy that plants had spontaneously grown around his strips of film, there was no question that Jon Strymish has an uniquely organic approach to photography. For decades, he’s been best known for his grainy, black and white, iconic images of musicians from Boston and beyond, always shot with film, frequently in the darkest conditions possible. Respectful of roots and obsessed with origins, Strymish once told Tommy Ramone that punk rock began with Bob Dylan. To those who know Strymish’s work, his new photography exhibit, “TURN: Spring Leaves,” may seem like a radical departure. To those who know him intimately, it’s an organic extension of his music photography and a natural progression.

An ability to draw light out of the darkest shadows is, stylistically, what he’s known for. Across the years, his work has appeared on albums by Peter Wolf, Mission of Burma, countless folk musicians and rockers and on the walls of folk and rock haunts including Club Passim and CBGB.  Despite the drastically different subject matter between his images of musicians and leaves, the stylistic similarities are strong and unmistakably the work of the same photographer.

His decision to finally photograph the leaves after decades of thinking about the series was triggered by some turbulent changes in his life during the past two years. Around the time that he and his family decided to sell The New England Mobile Book Fair, the bookstore his father founded over 50 years earlier,  Strymish was diagnosed with a heart condition.

With its inherent theme of rebirth, it’s appropriate that the exhibit’s September run coincides with the opening of the Portsmouth Book and Bar, a bookstore and cafe in Portsmouth, New Hampshire that Strymish is launching with two of his closest friends, David Lovelace and John Petrovato, both bookselling veterans he has known since college.

From leaving an old bookstore to opening a new one. From crouching at the front of stages in dark, loud, cramped music clubs to standing before branches sprouting signs of new life in dimly-lit paths through silent woods. Always searching for light in the darkest of shadows, only Jon Strymish would spend decades embedded in rock, folk, books and blues to find a new muse in the first leaves of spring.

Nicole White at Gallery UNO, Chicago

NICOLE WHITE – THE SURROUND

Gallery UNO
Fine Arts Building
410 S Michigan Ave
Chicago, IL 60605

Opening Reception: September 14, 6-8pm

During: September 1 – October 31, 2012

Artist Talk: October 12, 6pm

“If the figures and intended subjects of photographs were cut away, the mass of photography—the acreage of prints and slides and screens and posters and digital frames—would be comprised of overlooked, un-needed and unwanted details. … the surround, which is often enough unwanted…is only noticed when it helps identify the place the photograph was taken, or when it adds a general atmosphere.” ¹ Nicole focuses the attention of the viewer on the overlooked in her new body of work, The Surround. The expected compositional reference points are absent, leaving the viewer to reconsider the photograph’s function. 

¹James Elkins, What Photography Is, 117.

- Curator Barbara Goebels-Cattaneo

www.nicolewhite.net