Tag Archive "gallery-339"

Extreme contrast – William Larson and Phillip Toledano at Gallery 339

On entering Gallery 339, currently hosting work by William Larson and Phillip Toledano, your first sight is of an array of white panels, each adorned with a print of bold swaths of color and filmstrips. William Larson’s exhibition The Cut is the latest iteration of the legendary photographer’s lifelong study of the ways in which recording motion and time can be altered. Upstairs, Phillip Toledano’s series, A New Kind of Beauty, examines the often extreme measures people will go to for physical beauty.

Weekly Update – Facial recognition at Gallery 339

For a long time now, artists have been stealing faces. Portraiture, whether sculptural, painted or printed, is a thief. Even when a portrait shows a likeness, the face is often there to represent a larger truth about the human condition.  No matter how much Abraham Lincoln looks like himself in art, he is always the great emancipator and a symbol of liberty and justice. ”About Face” at Gallery 339 takes aim at the human face — in black and white and color photographs by 25 artists — and arrays a small congregation on the walls. Beautiful and compelling, moody, funny or ...

Photographing the Baker family – an interview with Andrea Modica

The photographic series “Fountain” by Andrea Modica gives an insider view of modern industrial hunters, aka the Baker family. The Bakers run a small slaughterhouse that has been in the family for three generations. The collaboration between artist and family created a series of photographs that are like a well-developed philosophy of the expired, expressed with the gentle and careful use of tone and mood that constantly challenges a carnivore’s contribution to animal slaughter and its often quiet consequences (i.e. health). In this series of photographs, animal and human merge within the shadows without ever showing the blood and guts ...

Alex Da Corte at MoMA, AIR’s free studios, Gallery 339′s Japan relief, Butch Cordora’s DVD and more news!

Alex DaCorte continues his razzle-dazzle art career when MoMA screens a video of his next week, Thursday, April 14. (Read Annette Monnier’s thoughtful review of Alex’s recent 2-venue show at Bodega and Extra Extra.) He’s one of 10 artists who were invited to create video responses to songs on Leonard Cohen’s 10-song album New Skin for the Old Ceremony, one song per artist.

Taxonomies In Review at Gallery 339

In Review’s 10 photographers seem deeply immersed in thoughts about the fragility of the human condition and the slipperiness of reality.  The photographers are also into taxonomies – groups of barns, humans, animals, buildings, teenagers and more.  The show, at Gallery 339, is full of quirky and sometimes hallucinatory imagery.

Shibata’s roads, Modica’s boys of summer at 339

The pairing of photographic works by Toshio Shibata and Andrea Modica at Gallery 339 is inspired. From the sublime breadth of Shibata’s unpeopled highway landscapes to Modica’s specific, humanistic portraits of farm-league baseball players, the two excellent stand-alone exhibits reach across the gallery spaces in conversation with each other.

Weekly Update – Size matters, so does content

This week’s Weekly has my review of shows at Gallery 339 and Gallery Joe. More photos at flickr drawings and photos. “8×10 and Under” at Gallery 339 proves that bigger isn’t always better when it comes to art. While large photos may enfold you in their world and give you a quick hit of satisfaction, tiny images pay back viewers by forcing them to study the pieces and create stronger, more lasting relationships.

Philly portraits at Gallery 339 and PAFA

Portraits are everywhere, right now, major portraits. I had a nice conversation with myself after seeing two terrific shows of Philadelphia portraits in the same week–the show Personal Views: Contemporary Photographic Portraiture in Philadelphia, at Gallery 339;  and the paintings in Barkley L. Hendricks’ Birth of the Blues at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Ridiculous and sublime, have it all — David Graham and Paul Cava at Gallery 339

David GrahamGoodyear, Arizona, 2006photographic c-print, ed. 2520×24″30×40″ David Graham‘s Almost Paradise at Gallery 339 shows the Philadelphia photographer’s recent road trips all over the US. Almost Hell is more like it. Touching down everywhere from the post-Katrina south of New Orleans and Gulfport to places like Goodyear, Az, Omaha, NE, and Studio City CA, Graham trains his camera on the odd surreal moment and, especially, the odd bit of American advertising signage.  Graham’s deadpanning camera serves up the real world as one piece of Almost Fiction after another. It’s not really Ripley’s Believe it Or Not but sometimes it’s not too far ...

Weekly Update – Yale photographers aim for the heart at Gallery 339

This week’s Weekly has my review of the Yale MFA photo show at Gallery 339. Below is the copy with some photos. Also in this week’s print version of the paper is last week’s story about the Robot 250 project in Pittsburgh. Suyeon YunCrabmeat, Boulder CO, 2007Archival Pigment Print Yale’s M.F.A. program in photography is known for turning out artists who specialize in stagey, inscrutable film-noir hyper-realism focused on scenes of societal or domestic dysfunction. Gregory Crewdson, himself a perpetrator of X-Files-like drama photos, is the Yale prof who makes such a heavy imprint. But for every rule there’s an exception. ...