Dressed in Gray
Dressed in Gray
Curated by Lisa Ohlweiler
September 14 - October 19, 2013
SHOW CATALOG (PDF)
PRESS RELEASE (PDF)
Curated by LA-based artist Lisa Ohlweiler, Dressed in Gray brings together seven works that explore the tension in contemporary photography between clarity and obscurity. By sourcing existing images, employing analog methods and digital interventions, the works in the show disrupt the expectations of straight photography, examining its limits with images that exist at threshold of photographic formulation. Through the works of Walead Beshty, Gil Blank, Whitney Hubbs, Dwyer Kilcollin, Mark McKnight, Matt Siegle, and James Welling, the show seeks to exist in the space between image and recognition. The works challenge traditional modes of viewing without discarding the connection created by and derived from a photograph’s arm to the world.
Dressed in Gray includes work from James Welling’s ongoing War series, which features scenes of destruction within virtual city layouts created in 3-D rendering programs. Gil Blank presents an untitled piece isolating the name “Tokyo,” the image sourced from a sign mounted outside the former Times Square headquarters of Lehman Brothers. Matt Siegle’s “unfinished” photo-realistic drawings draw from photographs of specific, often politically tragic moments in history. Sculptural reliefs by Dwyer Kilcollin map the tonal values of magazine images. A nude by Whitney Hubbs digitally removes a girl’s tattoo, and Mark McKnight’s Blind depicts a blind cat casting contrasting shadows before a mirror. Tracing physical travel, the work by Walead Beshty places unexposed film through airport x-ray machines.
Walead Beshty is a Los Angeles-based artist and writer, and Associate Professor in the Graduate Fine Art Program of Art Center College of Art and Design. Beshty holds a BA from Bard College and an MFA from the Yale University School of Art. His solo exhibitions include: Walead Beshty: Legibility on Colored Backgrounds, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2009); Pulleys, Cogwheels, Mirrors, and Windows, The University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI (2009); Travel Pictures (2006-2008), LAX ART, Los Angeles, CA (2009); Industrial Pictures, Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels, Belgium; Hammer Project: Walead Beshty, The Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2006); Walead Beshty, P.S.1/MoMA Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, Los Angeles (2004).
Gil Blank is a photographer and a frequent writer on the social, political, and historical contexts of photographic practices. His photographs have been exhibited at PS1/MoMA Contemporary Art Center and White Columns, New York; Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver; CB Roppongi, Tokyo; and Ville D’Images, Vevey, Switzerland. Active in publishing, he has served in various editorial capacities for Art On Paper, Issue, and Whitewall, and was a founding editor of Influence, an independently published magazine devoted to contemporary image-making. His writing also regularly appears in monographs, including Freischwimmer, by Wolfgang Tillmans (Tokyo Opera City, 2005), and White Planet, Black Heart, by Torbjørn Rødland (Steidl, 2006), as well as in surveys, such as In Numbers: Serial Artist Editions, 1955–2008 (JRP/Ringier and PPP Editions, 2009) and Words Without Pictures (Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Aperture, 2010). An essay on photographic portraiture practice is forthcoming in the catalog for Becoming Disfarmer, to be published by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in 2014.
Whitney Hubbs holds her MFA from UCLA and her BFA from California College of the Arts, San Francisco. Hubbs work is held in the permanent collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art: Library, New York and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Recent exhibitions include Diane Rosenstein Fine Art, Los Angeles, Carter and Citizen, Los Angeles, Roberts and Tilton, Los Angeles. Hubbs was included in 2010’s FotoFest Biennial, Houston, Texas and notable press includes a highlight in Vince Aletti’s “Eight Emerging Photographers from Southern California” for The New Yorker (2011) as well as featured in Blind Spot Issue 38 (2008). Her recent solo show, The Song Iteself is Already a Skip was exhibited at M+B gallery Los Angeles 2013. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
Dwyer Kilcollin is a Los Angeles based artist working in the intersection of physical sculpture and virtual space. Kilcollin received her MFA from USC and her recent exhibitions include Stein in Sein at USC Roski Gallery, Los Angeles and 10 forms at Machine Projects, Los Angeles. Her works have also been exhibited at Pepin Moore Gallery, Los Angeles, and in an uncoming exhibition Surface Area at Favorite Goods which opens September 20th.
Mark McKnight received his BFA in 2007 from the San Francisco Art Institute and is the recipient of both a Fulbright scholarship (2008) and a Lois Roth Endowment. Mark is currently a Chancellor’s Fellow and MFA Candidate at the University of California, Riverside. Recent exhibitions include Roberts and Tilton, Los Angeles, Post Gallery, Los Angeles, Cal State Long Beach, Long Beach, the New York Photo Festival, New York, and has a forthcoming solo exhibition at the Underground Museum, Los Angeles.
Matt Siegle is a Los Angeles based mixed-media artist. His drawings and performances explore altruism, counterculture, and embodied history. He received his MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2009. Exhibitions include: Artists Space, New York, Anthony Greaney, Boston, The Bindery Projects (Minneapolis), 104 CENTQUATRE, Paris, Dan Graham, Los Angeles, Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles, Human Resources Los Angeles, NADA Hudson, New York, Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival, Los Anegles, PACT-Zollverien, Essen. Siegle’s practice also includes writing (“Doubtful Motion: Gesture as Performance” in Prism Of Reality, 2012), and he co-runs the artist-project space metro pcs.
James Welling is an artist living and working in Los Angeles. He received both his MFA and BFA from California Institute of the Arts and in 1995, he moved from New York to Los Angeles and became area head of the photography program at UCLA. Solo exhibitions include Regen Projects, Los Angeles; David Zwirner, New York; Maureen Paley, London; Galerie Nelson-Freeman, Paris; Wako Works of Art, Tokyo; Donald Young, Chicago, and Galerie Nächst St. Stephan, Vienna. Recent exhibitions include the 2008 Whitney Biennial, The Pictures Generation 1974-1984 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Originating at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio, his upcoming retrospective exhibition James Welling: Monograph opens at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles September 29th.
Installation
