March 14 - May 4, 2013 Reception for the artist, Thursday, March 14th, 2013, 6-8 pm
Julie Saul Gallery announces our 11th solo show with Sally Gall, who has been represented by the gallery since 1985. She is known as a classical photographer who takes the natural world as her subject. Unbound represents a shift in Gall's visual language in which she combines photographs to create diptychs and triptychs comprised of images that depict a weightless world without horizons. Gall brings together black and white and color images and a variety of formats which function as a whole to convey the spirit of the unbound.
Gall has noted that in the natural world we use the horizon as our reference and now she seeks to create a feeling of weightlessness and flight. Gall explains: "in Unbound, clouds, airplanes, and contrails figure prominently. I imagine planes as poetic objects, heavy metal bodies that appear to float with ease. Clouds contain tons of water yet also appear weightless. I wish to evoke the feeling of floating ungrounded, to transport the viewer to a place not bound by gravity, and escape the constraint of our usual horizon-oriented experience." The vertical format of the multi-image works were initially inspired by Asian scrolls which she notes have "epic intentions, the ability to condense images of a large world into intimate space, and a deep reverence for nature." In earlier bodies of work, Crawl (2008) and Subterranea (2003), Gall also eschewed a conventional horizon orientation.
Sally Gall received a BFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1978. She has taught and lectured extensively in the United States and Europe. Public collections include the Guggenheim Museum, The Whitney Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College.
PROJECT GALLERY Elli Chung: KAMI
March 14 - May 4, 2013 Reception for the artist, Thursday, March 14th, 2013, 6-8 pm
Elli Chung, who received an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2012, presents an artists' book and selection of prints from her thesis project, KAMI. Kami is an East-Asian philosophy of aesthetics derived from Buddhist tradition; the word is Japanese for "god" or "essence" and refers to the spirits that inhabit the physical world. The book is made of large-scale prints, which can be viewed alongside the text describing each of the gods.
Chung has crafted a series of photographic scenes from nature and domestic life, which allude to mythological creatures from Japanese folklore. For example, a spout of water rising from an algae-covered pond is KAPPA, "a lake monster with a water-filled head and a love of cucumbers;" and a potato nestled by the water's edge is KAWA AKAGO, "an infant monster who lurks near rivers and drowns people." Chung remarked, "Kami is a contemplation on imagination and the intimate relationship between our desires and the way we read and experience images."
Gall and Chung, photographic artists from two generations, share a profound and spiritual respect for nature and use their subjective imaginations as the prism through which they depict the world. For further information or images, please contact Elizabeth@saulgallery.com
