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Sprüth Magers, London |
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JEAN-LUC MYLAYNE
April 16 - May 29 2010
Sprüth Magers London is
pleased to present the first solo exhibition by the artist
Jean-Luc Mylayne at the London gallery. In
1976, Jean-Luc Mylayne made the decision to sell his house,
car and possessions in the pursuit of his craft, accompanied
only by his wife and collaborator, Mylčne. From the environs
of Mylayne's native Amiens, he was drawn to the skies and
parched earth of Santa Fe, New Mexico and, more recently, to
Fort Davis in Texas, the 'stages' for the works shown in this
latest exhibition.
A self-taught photographer and keen scholar
of philosophy, Mylayne's artistic endeavour would initially
appear to hinge upon surreptitiously capturing images of
birds. Upon closer inspection, however, Mylayne is engaging in
an exploration of temporality and the relationship of
humankind to both nature and the environments in which we live
and how we perceive them. It was not until 2004, on a ranch
situated near the McDonald Observatory at Fort Davis, that
Mylayne was able to realise a childhood ambition: 'Since I was
ten years old,' the artist has noted, 'I knew that I would
come here for the Bluebirds. In particular I wanted to work
with these three species of North American Bluebirds because
they have the most incredible blue colour. I looked for a
long, long time to find a place to see all three species at
the same time.' Whilst the colour of the bluebird is a vital
part of its appeal, recalling as it does the blue of the skies
and waters of its environment, the titles of the works reveal
the length of time invested by Mylayne in taking each
photograph. It is this engagement with the temporality of
image-making that brings us closer to the sheer sense of
endeavour involved in these photographs. In No. 508, February
March April, 2007, it took three months to set up Mylayne's
equipment and capture this one image of a bird. Once the
equipment is in place, he waits for the arrival of his
skittish subjects who, in the process of becoming accustomed
to Mylayne and his photographic paraphernalia, respond by
resting long enough to be caught on film. A preoccupation with
the discourse of time is further revealed in the absence of
information concerning the location and species of bird.
In contrast to the staple equipment of the
wildlife photographer, Mylayne uses a large format 8 x 10 film
camera and eschews the intrusive telephoto lens, preferring to
rely on 50 plus hand-made lenses to alter the depth of field
to his precise requirements. What Mylayne captures is not
always in focus, nor is it always central to the frame; often
hidden or partially visible, his images symbolise the
paradoxical nature of time and our experience of it. For the
bird the moment is fleeting, once captured on film, however,
it assumes a degree of permanence and posterity. With multiple
focal point perspectives, Mylayne replicates the experience of
looking whereby the eye roams over the picture, as he
describes, 'just as it would if we were to perceive it with
our eyes'. In other words, we see these painstakingly captured
images as though we were in situ with Mylayne surveying the
scene. We perceive the bird as we would perceive it in nature
and what we see in Mylayne's images is an essentially human
viewpoint on the transience of the natural world.
Jean-Luc Mylayne was born
in Marquise, France in 1946 and lives and works throughout the
world. In November 2010, Mylayne will have a major
retrospective at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia
in Madrid. His first show with Sprüth Magers took place in
2002 in Cologne, Germany. Recent solo exhibitions include the
Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York (2009), Museum of
Contemporary Art, Cleveland (2008), the Blaffer Gallery, and
the Texas Gallery, Houston, U.S.A. (2007). The Lannan
Foundation, Santa Fe, funded his stay at the Bernal Ranch,
culminating in an exhibition at the Foundation in 2005. In
2004 Laurent Busine curated a show of his work at MAC, Grand
Hornu, Belgium. His first UK exhibition was held at The
Photographers' Gallery in London in 2007. In his native France
he has had major exhibitions at the Musée d'Art Moderne,
Saint-Etienne (1991 and 1994), ARC/Musée d'Art Moderne de la
Ville de Paris (1995), the Musée de l'Abbaye Sainte-Croix, Les
Sables d'Olonne (1993), the Musée Bonnat, Bayonne, 'Le Carré'
(1992), the Bibliothčque Nationale, Paris (1990) and the Musée
des Beaux-Arts, Calais (1989).
Image:
Jean-Luc
Mylayne
No. 301, Mars Avril
2005
C-print
123 x 123 cm
(framed)
Unique
Courtesy of Sprüth Magers Berlin
London
Sprüth Magers London
7A Grafton
Street
London
W1S 4EJ
London
T +44 (0) 207
4081613
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Robert Miller Gallery, New
York |
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IN PRAISE OF SHADOWS
DIRK BRAECKMAN AND BILL
HENSON
April 8 - June 12, 2010
Robert Miller
Galleryis pleased to present In Praise of
Shadows, an exhibition of works by Dirk Braeckman
and Bill Henson.
In 2002, Dirk Braeckman
was commissioned to make portraits of Belgium's King Albert
and Queen Paola which are permanently installed along with
other of his works in the Royal Palace in Brussels.
Braeckman's photographs have been shown in a retrospective
exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (SMAK)
in Ghent. His recent solo shows were at the Bernier/Eliades
Gallery in Athens, Greece and at the De Pont Foundation for
Contemporary Art, Tilburg, Netherlands. He lives and works in
Ghent. Braeckman's photographs, the majority of them in black
and white, focus on abstract spaces, domestic interiors and
other loci of the built environment. The subtle range of tone
and the extraordinary matte surface of his gelatin silver
prints give these images an enigmatic presence. Flatness and
depth become difficult to discern, paradoxical. A dining room
seems three dimensional but it is powerfully unified in tone.
A figure appears to have been captured in real life but may in
reality be a photograph of a photograph. Braeckman's lens
focuses on the details in a corner, on a body, on a specific
interior or a sterile public space. Yet the effect is anything
but confining. Printed large scale in lush tonality, the
photographs have both an expansive and tactile quality.
Braeckman concentrates on the personal and the tentative. He
says, "To me, it's about sensing and playing on certain
photographic conditions-the frame, the ephemerality of an
exposure, the way one reads black & white or color, the
blurriness, the light."
Bill Henson's works are
found in many international collections including the Solomon
R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the
Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris, the Montreal Museum of Fine
Arts and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and in every major
public collection in Australia. His photographs, first
exhibited at Robert Miller in 2004, demonstrate the artist's
interest in the duality of nature and artifice, in
adolescence, and in the distinction between male and female.
These beautiful and mysterious images are characterized by
chiaroscuro, translucent skin tones, and jewel-like colors
that add an ethereal quality to ambiguous settings. The 2004
exhibition was followed in 2006 by a show that included work
made after Henson's retrospective Mnemosyne at the National
Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney and the National Gallery of
Victoria, Melbourne. This body of work extended Henson's
abiding interest in staging, tableau and a belief in the
artifice of theatrical presentation as a profound form.
Henson's figures emerge from and merge into darkness, and
shadowy landscapes are shot through with constrained light and
contain vestiges of human presence.
Images:
Dirk
Braeckman
N.P.-M.I.-05
Gelatin silver
print
471/4 x 71 inches
120 x 180 inches
Courtesy of
Robert Miller Gallery, New York
Bill Henson
UNTITLED,
1998/1999/2000
Type "C" color photograph
50 x 70 7/8
inches
127 x 180 cm
Courtesy of Robert Miller Gallery,
New York
Robert Miller Gallery
524 West
26th Street
New York, NY 10001
T +1 212.366.4774
E
rmg @ robertmillergallery.com
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Galerie La Ferronnerie,
Paris |
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Sanna Kannisto
Close observer
April 8th to May 28th 2010
In the exhibition Close observer
Sanna Kannisto embraces the idea of the
photograph as an objective document, but at the same time a
strong need for a personal expressive narrative is also
present. The artist observes natural phenomena such as rain,
streams, spider webs, bird calls, plant reactions, snake
movements but also her own individual position of the actor/
experiencer in producing and interpreting the data. Sanna
Kannisto's project relates to a topic that has aroused
interest in visual art circles in recent years, namely the
terrain that separates the arts and sciences. In many ways,
the project also relates to the history of scientific
visualisation. Her pictures also incorporate humour and a
sense of the absurd, which point to surrealism and
structuralism, to the relationships between avant-garde and
anthropology.
'...Sanna Kannisto has focused on plants
and animals in tropical rain forests for years. She has
gradually accumulated an impressive body of work that
examines, in a style both rigorous and deli-cate, not just the
wondrous species of the tropics but the metaphors of seeing,
science, photography and art. Her work presents us with a
collection and a theatre; it focuses attention on plants and
animals that one could rarely hope to see in their natural
habitat, and even more miraculously reveals and unleashes the
mechanisms of this theatrical presentation wherein lie its two
wonders.'
(Harri Laakso, 'Lucidities of the image ~
On the Photography of Sanna Kannisto', 2009, Foam magazine,
#19, p. 151-154)
In her work, Sanna Kannisto explores the
relationship between nature and culture and the theories and
concepts which are used to approach nature within the arts and
sciences. Her methods, field studies and the objective
scientific way of presenting the objects, refer not only to
anthropological and archaeological ways of working, but also
to studio portraiture and staged photography.
Sanna Kannisto was born in
1974 in Härmeelinna, Finland. She currently lives and works in
Helsinki. She studied photography both at the Turku School of
Art and Communication and at the University of Art and Design
in Helsinki. She has exhibited her works in many solo and
group shows widely since 2002, including the Masters of Arts
at The Finnish Museum of Photo graphy in Helsinki, Personally
at Kulturhuset in Stockholm, Self Timer at Kunsthalle
Fridericianum in Kassel and The Faraway Nearby at the White
Box in New York, Repeat All at the Centro Cultural Matucana
100 in Santiago de Chile, Research and Invention at Fotomuseum
Winterthur, Switzerland, Arctic Hysteria Onscreen at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York and elles@centrepompidou at
the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
(Published by Foam
international photography magazine, #19/Wonder, Summer
2009)
Image:
Sanna Kannisto
Close
Observer, 2010
c-print Fuji Crystal archive
108 x
132 cm
Courtesy of Galerie La Ferronnerie Brigitte Négrier,
Paris
GALERIE LA FERRONNERIE - BRIGITTE
NÉGRIER
40, rue de la Folie-Méricourt
75011
Paris
France
T +33 (0)1 78 01 13 13
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Craig Krull Gallery, Los
Angeles |
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Michael Light: InterMountain
Marc Valesella:
Not Negotiable
April 24th - May 29th, 2010
Craig Krull Gallery is
pleased to present InterMountain, an exhibition of
recent work from Michael Light's ongoing
aerial photographic investigation of the inhabited arid
American West. In his previous exhibition here, Light
presented images of the vast grid of Los Angeles at night. His
new work moves east from California towards Utah, Arizona,
Idaho, Wyoming and Colorado. Light continues his clear-eyed
examination of the way we inhabit and alter our surroundings
through a 4x5" aerial view camera from his self-piloted light
aircraft or rented helicopters. His perspective addresses what
critic Stephen Vincent calls "the mythology and consequences
of American westward expansion." In fact, the mammoth
hand-made photo books that Light creates (measuring 36x44"
when opened) are a response to the efforts of 19th century
photographers such as Timothy O'Sullivan, who created volumes
of photographs for government sponsored geological surveys
that were intended to identify resources and attract
settlement. The photographs in this exhibit range from images
of the world's largest excavation at the Bingham Copper Mine
near Salt Lake City, to the wholesale transformation of
Wyoming's Green and Powder River Basins by relentless natural
gas and coal extraction, to the architectures of economic
stratification in Phoenix. The exhibit will also include two
of Light's most recent photobooks, one in color focusing on
the Snake River and Twin Falls, Idaho and the other a black
and white journey above snow blanketed environs of Denver. A
component of the exhibition will be on view concurrently at
The Gallery at The Archer School for Girls (11725 Sunset Blvd.
L.A.). A reception for Michael Light will take place at Craig
Krull Gallery on Saturday April 24th from 3-5pm. The reception
at the Archer School for Girls will be held the same afternoon
from 4-5:30 with an artist talk to follow at 5:30.
(Reservations for the talk can be made by calling
310/873-7043.)
In conjunction with the Michael Light
exhibition, the gallery will present a series of photographs
by Marc Valesella entitled Not
Negotiable. The title refers to a statement made by then
President George H.W. Bush during a 1992 Earth Summit. When
asked why he was resistant to making changes that could help
the environment, the President replied that the American way
of life is "not negotiable." Valesella's black and white
20x24" photographs, made with an 8x10" camera, document dark
and desolate landscapes of Southern California that have been
ravaged by wildfires in an era of repeated annual droughts and
some of most devastating fires on record.
Images:
Michael Light
Barney's Canyon Gold Mine, Near Bingham Canyon,
UT
Archival Pigment Print
Edition: 5.
h: 40 x w:
50 in
Courtesy of Craig Krull Gallery
Marc Valesella
Not Negotiable,
5
2004
Gelatin Silver Print
Edition: 10
h: 20
x w: 24 in
Courtesy of Craig Krull Gallery
Craig Krull Gallery
Bergamot
Station
2525 Michigan Avenue, Building B3
Santa
Monica
Los Angeles, CA 90404
T +1 310.828.6410
E info
@ craigkrullgallery.com
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re-title.com - Independent directories of
emerging & professional contemporary art
Coming Next
April 21-22 Mixed Media
April 28-29 Sculpture &
Installation
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BM Box 5163
London
WC1N 3XX
United
Kingdom
+44 (0) 870 922
0438 |
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