Mike Weiss Gallery is pleased to present a questionable low point in our program: Birth of a Legend, by nomadic artist Cameron Gray. Roberta Smith and Jerry Saltz claim that “Cameron Gray is too big too fail,” and Paddy Johnson of Art Fag City asked for “more cheddar” with her order of Cameron Gray. Gray’s latest exploit serves up a Dionysian smörgåsbord of state-of-the-art digital technology, where kaleidoscopically bright palettes and hypnotic kitsch run rampant. With your senses utterly titillated and suitably doped, you‘ll discover his artistic touch is as light as his work is raucous; speed of play carefully calibrated, execution satirically dead-pan, and content spot-on HOT. Straddling the line between comfort and the disquietingly uncanny, Gray’s gargantuan installations flash, blink, twirl, and pulsate off the walls in utter pandemonium, culling visual and auditory white noise from the vast Internet in something akin to a holy art apocalypse. As Gray descends into the deepest realms of the web world, we can only look on and marvel at the chaos that we have created.
 
Frequently likened to the second coming of Koons and thoroughly rooted within postmodern sensibilities, Gray is an incredibly articulate forager of the irreverent. In I Was Made For Dancin’, All, All, All Night Long, Gray achieves near tantric nirvana, emblazoning a glossy, hollowed Leif Garrett poster with psychedelic patterns and prismatic forms; two all-seeing eyes flicking every which way as he sluggishly sings the work’s eponymous and utterly cheeky song. Acid Zen Garden imbues a glowing cherub figure and assorted fauna with Gray’s unrivaled knack for mischief. Like-wise, in Ice Cream for John Wayne, a duo of melting waffle cone treats take residence upon John Wayne’s dreamy visage. Not content to simply tear the ‘mask’ off such iconic machismo, Cameron spatters many a surrounding wall with fluorescent, glow-in-the-dark paint—effectively taking on Abstract Expressionist bravado as well.
 
A shaman of digital technique and reprographic means, Gray sets forth an alternate universe rife with under-auto black lighting and over-the-top pop, instinctively splaying nonsensical sights and sounds across an ambitious range of mediums: video collages chock-full of outlandish abstractions, including an all-encompassing 12 foot wide work comprised of 27 monitors; an epic 7-foot-tall pin bricolage in which 3,000 photographic images abut embedded 3-D video, spinning disco-lights, and utterly unrelated bric-a-brac; manipulated c-prints of classic American icons; and circular, Archimboldo-like smiley-face sculptures in which fake food is adhered to densely-patterned, wood-mounted table-cloths, with fake plastic ‘turkey dinners’ forming the eyes of one piece, and a glazed faux Jell-O mold its nose. Simultaneously chaotic, organic, orgasmic, and narcotic, Gray delivers the Cadillac of collage, the epitome of hyper-stimulation, and the ultimate state of transcendence – a meaningless yet tantalizing void, where nothing is sacred. Indulge yourself this summer in this orgiastic, optical feast and celebrate with us the 10-year anniversary of Mike Weiss Gallery.
 
Cameron Gray, Birth of a Legend.
 
Born in Geneva in 1980, Cameron Gray lives and works in London, Basel, and Los Angeles. Graduating egregia cum laude from Bruce High Quality Foundation University, Gray also holds no less than six degrees from such prestigious institutions as Yale, Columbia, and UCLA. Prior to his ascension into the upper levels of the art historical pantheon, Gray will have participated in two Venice Biennales, including the one to take place in 2015, and three Whitney Biennials, including those in 2016 and 2018. In 2012, Galerie Eva Presenhuber included his work in the seminal show I Wanna F*ck You But We‘re Just Gonna Cuddle, and one of Gray’s massive pin collages was a show-stopping success in The Gag Reflex is Mysterious at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2011. Grey‘s work is included in the Ludwig-Forum für Internationale Kunst in Aachen, Germany; the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts in Kaohsiung, Taiwan; the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, CT; and 17 other prominent collections. Cameron Gray is currently represented by Mike Weiss Gallery, David Zwirner, Thaddaeus Ropac, Sprueth Magers, White Cube and Pace Beijing, amongst others.
 
Your mom loves Cameron Gray’s work. Ask her, she told us so.

Erin Murray “Settling”
 
Opening May 9, 6-8pm through June 15, 2013
 
Nancy Margolis Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Erin Murray’s first solo New York exhibition, “Settling”, on May 9, 2013 and on view through June 15, 2013. The artist’s reception will take place May 9 from 6-8 pm.
Murray’s landscapes take built environments as their subject and formalize their banality as art. The show’s series of graphite and charcoal drawings features Murray’s characteristic austerity and, like the exhibition’s oil-on-panel paintings of unsettling landscapes, examines the real world in a surreal way. Devoid of people, Murray’s landscapes are permeated by an intensity that creates an anthropomorphic connect and imbues their mundane architecture with a significance otherwise unrealized.
Murray skillfully and innovatively employs different approaches to each drawing and painting so that, while the works in “Settling” vary in medium, the show’s mood and theme are consistent. Murray’s drawings are defined by their meticulous execution, striking perspectives, and high contrast, rendering these works near-portraits of the structures they depict, albeit cold and aloof. Through these techniques Murray monumentalizes her subjects, as in the large-scale Body Building (2012, 36″x108″). Intentionally stark, but dramatic, the drawing compels the viewer to empathize with the forgotten structure and find beauty in its symmetry.
The series of paintings offers a different mode of reductiveness. In contrast with Murray’s drawings, the paintings are replete with lush colors, radiantly rendered skies, depth of space, and lyrical, curvilinear forms. Nevertheless, they exude a similar timelessness and theatricality. Through titles such as Settling (potential energy) (2013, 24”x24”), Murray makes oblique references to the scene—the presence of a propane tank, electrical panel and solar array—while alluding to her landscapes’ emptiness, engendering nostalgia and contemplation.
A set of smaller paintings, titled Block Party (2013), likewise exposes the inherent artfulness of everyday structures. Each work hones in on a block-built wall, making abstract compositions of its colors, lines, shapes and patterns.
Interested in both the architectural history from which even the most humble of structures derive, and the cultural and economic realities they represent, the artist seeks meaning in seemingly meaningless spaces. In their precision and quietude, Murray’s works call attention to the oft-overlooked essence of built environments, making us see the extent to which we settle for our surrounds.
Erin Murray earned her B.F.A from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2001. She first showed at Nancy Margolis Gallery in 2011 with significant success. Since then, she has continued to show widely in Philadelphia and her work has been featured in several publications, including The Artblog, The Philadelphia Inquirer, New American Paintings Magazine, Tabletop Zine, and The News Journal. Her work is included in the collections of The Center for Emerging Visual Artists, Philadelphia, PA, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, and The West Collection, Oaks, PA.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work stems from my suspicion that the forms of the built environment carry an abundance of embedded meaning, which is reflective of our collective humanity even in the most humble of structures. A building or built form can be understood to represent our physical body, our cultural history, our economic reality, our long-formed habits. We naturalize our environment by reenacting the forms of the past, and we settle for the inevitable distortion. But with this distortion we also find things like sincerity, absurdity, failure, idealism and – hopefully – a sense of empathy.
EDUCATION
2001 Bachelor of Fine Art, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD. summa cum laude
SOLO & TWO-PERSON EXHIBITIONS
2013
Settling, Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York, NY
2012
Wind Challenge I, Fleisher Art Memorial, Philadelphia, PA
Municipalia, Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, Wilmington, DE.
2011
Solo Series, Abington Art Center, Philadelphia, PA.
Strata, Cerulean Gallery, Philadelphia, PA. two-person exhibition.
Erin Murray and Mark Masyga, Mount Airy Contemporary Artist’s Space, Philadelphia, PA. two-person exhibition.
Architecture Parlante, Slingluff Gallery, Philadelphia, PA.
2007
(un)Built, Painted Bride Art Center, Philadelphia, PA
SELECT GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2013
Spark Gap, Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA
Salon Zurcher, Galerie Zurcher, New York, NY
2012
THIS END UP, The West Collection at PULSE, Miami, FL
Earth and Artifice, Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA
West Collects, City Hall, Philadelphia, PA
Artists We Admire, Abington Art Center at the William Penn Foundation, Philadelphia, PA
Landscape, University of Delaware @ Crane Arts, Philadelphia, PA
Permanent Collection, curated by Edward Rosario and Jordin Isip, Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York, NY
High-Low Density, Rowan University Art Gallery, Glassboro, NJ
2011
Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York, NY
LOOK! On Lancaster Ave, public art project, Philadelphia, PA
2010
VOX VI, Vox Populi Gallery, Philadelphia PA
I Can’t Get You Out of My Mind, Seraphin Gallery, curated by Hiro Sakaguchi
Drawings, The Art Trust, West Chester, PA
2008
Underground, Center For Emerging Visual Artists, curated by Lee Stoetzel
Fall Collection, F.U.E.L. Collection, Philadelphia, PA
Landscapes on the Edge, The Art Trust, West Chester, PA
2007
New American Paintings Show, Lancaster Arts and Culture Center, Lancaster, PA
2006
From The Studio III, Center For Emerging Visual Artists, Philadelphia, PA
Projects Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
2005
Artist’s House, Philadelphia, PA Four-person exhibition
2004
Artist’s House, Philadelphia, PA Emerging Artist Exhibition
Creative Artist’s Network @SEI Investments, Oaks, PA.
2003
Creative Artist’s Network, Philadelphia, PA. Fall Group Exhibition
Baltimore Bound, Creative Artist’s Network @ MICA, Baltimore, MD.
Off The Wall, Creative Artist’s Network, Philadelphia, PA.
Creative Artist’s Network, Philadelphia, PA. Spring Group Exhibition
Creative Artist’s Network, Philadelphia, PA. Winter Group Exhibition
2002
Creative Artist’s Network, Philadelphia, PA. Fall Group Exhibtion
AWARDS
2012
West Collects, acquisition prize
PRESS
2012
Ben Meyer, “Fleisher Wind Challenge will blow you away–,” The Artblog
Victoria Donohoe, “Delaware Center Builds Worthy Show,” Philadelphia Inquirer
“Buildings and Contraptions R Us–DCCAs 2012 Gretchen Hupfel Symposium,” The Artblog
Maureen Milford, “Influence of buildings, objects on art explored at symposium,” The News Journal
2011
Victoria Donohoe, “‘Solo Series 2011’ explores art’s middle ground,” Philadelphia Inquirer
Edith Newhall, “Planes, panes, pallets,” Philadelphia Inquirer
Daniel Forrest Hoffman, “Erin Murray’s haunted architecture at Slingluff Gallery,” The Artblog,
Holly Otterbein, “First Friday Focus,” Philadelphia City Paper
2010
Edith Newhall, “Low-key Vox Pop,” Philadelphia Inquirer
Roberta Fallon, “VOX VI,” Philadelphia Weekly
Montana Torrey, “Curating the personal – I Just Can’t Get You Out of My Mind at Seraphin Gallery,” The Artblog
“Green Tease,” Philadelphia Magazine, April 2010, page 99
2008
Victoria Donohoe, “Range of Styles, Jewish Theme,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Galleries and Museums
2005
Laurence Liss, “Artist’s House,” Art Matters, June 2005, page 15
PUBLICATIONS
2012
Tabletop Zine, Issue 004, July-August
New American Paintings, #98 January-February
2007
New American Paintings, #69 April-May
PUBLIC LECTURES/PANELS
2012 “Boring” Architecture Tour and artist lecture, Fleisher Art Memorial
2012 Slide lecture, Art Salad Lecture Series, Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts
2012 Panelist, SUPERstructure, Gretchen Hupfel Symposium at Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts
COLLECTIONS
Center for Emerging Visual Artists, Philadelphia, PA
Temple University, Philadelphia, PA
The West Collection, Oaks, PA
REGISTRIES
Irving Sandler Artist’s File, Artist’s Space, New York, NY
The Drawing Center, New York, NY
MEMBERSHIP
2012-current Vox Populi Gallery
2002-2004 Center for Emerging Visual Artists

Carolee Schneemann
 
Flange 6rpm
 
May 11 – June 22, 2013
 
Reception: Saturday, May 11, 6-8pm
 
P·P·O·W is pleased to present Carolee Schneemann’s fourth exhibition at the gallery entitled Flange 6rpm. Originally a painter, Carolee Schneemann is a pioneer of extended media, from her explorations of ‘geometry of motion’ in Lateral Splay, 1963, the provocative group performance Meat Joy, 1964, her self-shot erotic film Fuses, 1965, and the meditation of solitary movements in Up To and Including Her Limits, 1973-76.
 
Upon entering the gallery the viewer is immersed in the projected foundry fires of Schneemann’s latest multi-sensory installation, Flange 6rpm. Seven motorized sculptural units; containing hand-sculpted components are uniquely, cast in aluminum from a lost wax process. The aluminum sculptures are not polished, but maintain a rough textured sill marked from the fire of the foundry. The sculptural units are each mounted on a motorized base which moves them at six revolutions per minute – slowly, side to side, as well as forward and back – in a continuous motion so that the sculptural elements are almost touching, creating a sense of tension and unpredictability.
 
Schneemann notes ‘The fundamental life of any material I use is concentrated in that material’s gesture — gesticulation, gestation, source of compression (measure of tension and expansion), resistance, developing force of visual action. Manifest in space, any particular gesture acts on the eye as a unit of time.' This statement reigns true to the materials of the four Dust Paintings, 1983-86, that occupy the walls of the second gallery. Degraded materials, ashes, soot, layers of dust, spilled paint, circuit boards, posit a visual correlative to the endless bombardments of Lebanese and Palestinian villages.
 
Saw Over Want, 1980-82 and Vulva’s Morphia, 1995, are composed from photographic grids separated by strips of text that accentuate and destabilize their associated images. The text in Saw Over Want, is taken from Schneemann’s childhood alphabet exercises. The words “saw”, “want”, and “over” have been repeatedly practiced. Strips of text underline images of ordinary objects and self-shot erotic body details. This contrast produces an aesthetic seepage. Vulva’s Morphia consists of thirty-six images which address normative taboos within an undulating grid of Paleolithic vulvas inscribed on rocks as well as sacred, obscene, scientific, and self-photographed vulvic images. Each sectional grid is underlined with a taboo reflection. For instance, “Vulva reads biology and understands she is an amalgam of proteins and oxytocin hormones which govern all her desires....”
 
A feature length film on Schneemann’s work and history entitled Breaking the Frame by Marielle Nitoslawska has recently been completed and shown at the Telluride Film Festival, BFI/London Film Festival, FNC Montreal, Glasgow, Cleveland and this month at the WRO Biennial, Wroclaw, Poland and Videoex, Zurich. Schneemann’s work has been exhibited worldwide, at institutions including the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Reina Sophia Museum, Madrid and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her published books include Cezanne; She Was A Great Painter (1976); Early and Recent Work (1983); More Than Meat Joy: Complete Performance Works and Selected Writings (1979); Correspondence Course (2010) by Kristine Stiles and Imaging Her Erotics–Essays, Interviews, Projects (2002). Color brochure to accompany the exhibition with essay by Melissa Ragona.

SIMON DENNY
All you need is data: the DLD 2012 Conference REDUX rerun
 
June 20 – July 27, 2013
 
Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition by Simon Denny entitled, All you need is data: the DLD 2012 Conference REDUX rerun, from June 20 to July 27, 2013. This is the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery. A catalogue published by Koenig, including an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, texts by Karen Archey, digital law expert Michael Littger and an introduction by co-curators Bart van der Heide and Saim Demircan, will accompany the show.
 
All you need is data: the DLD 2012 Conference REDUX rerun focuses on the 2012 edition of Munich’s annual Digital Life Design (DLD) conference dld-conference.com/. The conference is a high caliber platform for the exchange of ideas between digital media, the sciences and culture, which had the theme “All You Need Is … DATA?” in 2012. Denny’s exhibition was first presented at the Kunstverein Munich at the beginning of the year, alongside the 2013 DLD conference.
 
For his exhibition, Denny has created a display structure for 89 canvases that represent a visual summary of events that took place at DLD12, harvesting insights from the many speakers such as Jack Dorsey (Twitter), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook), Chris “Moot” Poole (4chan) and David Karp (tumblr), among others. The viewer is lead through the exhibition following a railing system that displays individual canvas “screens” that feature photos, pull-quotes and reconfigured stage and graphic designs from the conference. This content is flattened and depicted using iOS “skeuomorphic” style with app-like components. Only print media is used to illustrate the entire high-tech conference chronologically from beginning to end, forming what critic Kevin McGarry has described as “a structuralist memento mori”.
Simon Denny explores the materialization and commodification of “future visions and experiences,” and the lifespan of information in the context of fast paced, tech-driven commerce. The exhibition is a revealing format for how predetermined futures are promoted from the perspective of the digital economy. As such, the ‘REDUX’ in the title suggests a revisit of these future forecasts and is also indicative of the ‘Director’s Cut’ or a re-edit as a means of artistic appropriation.
Simon Denny was born in New Zealand in 1982 and received his degree at the Städelschule, Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Frankfurt. He has had numerous solo exhibitions, with shows at the Aspen Art Museum and Kunstverein Munich in the past year. He will be included in this year’s Venice Biennial as well as have an exhibition at MuMOK, Vienna this summer as a winner of the Art Basel Statements Baloise Preis in 2012. He is also a nominee for this year’s German Nationalgalerie Preis at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. Simon Denny lives and works in Berlin.
Petzel Gallery is located at 456 West 18th Street New York, NY 10011. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM. Gallery hours will switch to our summer schedule, Monday through Friday from 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM starting July 8th through the end of the exhibition. For press inquiries, please contact Andrew Black at andrew@petzel.com, or call (212) 680-9467.
For general inquiries, please email andrea@petzel.com.

New York, NY. Porter Contemporary is pleased to announce Never Ending Story, a solo exhibition highlighting the new works of Jennifer Murray opening with an artist’s reception on May 23 from 6:30 to 8:30 PM, an artist talk and music listening party on May 30 and continuing through June 22, 2013.
 
Charcoal, ink, acrylic, photography and animal skulls are simply the beginning of the story to Jennifer Murray’s second solo exhibition at Porter Contemporary. Murray imagines a totemic tribute to the power of mythology rooted in nature through a digital and technical lens. Murray will explore the ways in which we experience the power of the natural world using the color white in its varied patterns as the basis for inter-connectivity. In Ornament (Falcon) the white is the micro—the construction of space around living creatures that characterizes an era of surveillance and crowding. Tempest Drawing illustrates the macro of planetary movement, of weather patterns, of the increasingly interconnected ecosystem and world. Murray continues to explore this idea throughout Never Ending Story through various mediums and juxtapositions of work.
 
“The ‘story’ in these works is my contribution to the timeless practice of harnessing the primordial power of animals and nature to express the mythology of human imaginative existence. That this mythology must constantly be reimagined and retold for each new time is what makes it never ending,” says Jennifer Murray.
 
Listing Information
 
What: Never Ending Story – Solo exhibition of new works by Jennifer Murray
 
Exhibition Dates: May 23 – June 22, 2013
 
Opening Reception with the Artists: May 23, 6:30 – 8:30 PM
 
Press Preview: May 23, 4:30 – 6:30 PM
 
Artist Talk & Music Listening Party: May 30, 6:30 – 8:30 PM (RSVP required)
 
Where: Porter / Contemporary, 548 W. 28th Street, 3rd Floor, NYC
 
Gallery Hours: Tues & Wed by appointment; Thurs 11 - 8 PM; Fri & Sat 11 - 6 PM
 
General Inquiries: info@portercontemporary.com
Press Inquires: media@portercontemporary.com
 
About Jennifer Murray
 
Jennifer Murray is originally from Livermore, California. She utilizes both her study of visual art at Carnegie Mellon University, and, more recently, her study of sociology, history, and gender politics at NYU, to construct a body of work that chronicles her personal observations of social unrest, power structures, and the fallibility of culture. In addition to multiple locations in New York City, Jennifer has shown her work in Los Angeles, Seattle, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Miami, and Mermaid Beach, Australia. She has participated in International art fairs in both New York City and Miami, most recently the Aqua Art Fair during Art Basel Miami Beach. She lives and works in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
 
About Porter Contemporary
 
Launched in 2006, Porter Contemporary is dedicated to showcasing emerging and established artists from around the world whose work embodies both skill and risk taking. The mission of Porter Contemporary continues to be based on founder Jessica L. Porter‘s vision of opening contemporary art collecting to a broader audience. Over the past seven years, the gallery has earned a dedicated following of new and established collectors who value art that pushes boundaries.
 
In addition to presenting many distinctive exhibitions throughout the year, Porter Contemporary also provides art consultation services, collection management and artwork installation. Porter Contemporary is located in New York’s Chelsea district at 548 West 28th Street, just steps away from the beautiful High Line Park — like the gallery, a place to experience art and life from a new perspective.

Ricco/Maresca is pleased to present Marcos Bontempo: Dancing in the Void. This show marks the first time the gallery has brought the intricate and enigmatic works of the artist together in a solo exhibition. Born in Argentina in 1969, Bontempo moved with his family to Spain at the age of 6. He currently resides in Ronda, a culturally edifying city known for its stunning views and rich history. Bontempo, often viewed as complex and elusive, spends his days walking his dog through the town pocketing inspiration from the creative energy and natural beauty of the world that surrounds him.
 
In addition to his kinship with nature, Bontempo’s ingenuity can also be traced to his intermittent battles with schizophrenic episodes. Unencumbered by the outside world, the artist finds clarity in his work. Driven by both his environment and personal demons, Bontempo sits alone in his studio every day painting his own emotionally charged world filled with mental dissonance, adversity, and subtle glimpses of the hope aroused by the healing power of creation.
 
The exhibition brings together a powerful selection of paintings from Bontempo’s highly personalized and unique body of work. Bold in color and marked by ardent brushwork, the pieces portray a multifarious array of distorted bodies, floating in the pictorial plane while engaged in a disconcerting yet mystifying dance. His figures- some human, others more animalistic- emanate a personified amalgamation of cognitive agitation and freedom through physical malformation and cathartic expression. To create these lively and emphatic paintings, Bontempo uses ink or acrylic paint in combination with salt or iron. His dark palette of deep reds, blue, gold, and black embodied in fervent gestural abstraction are seemingly indicative of a primacy, misplaced and overthrown, and serve as a gentle reminder that both pain and normality are relative to one’s own experience.
 
Marcos Bontempo’s gentle and honest deportment is memorable on both a personal and professional level and he remains a welcome addition the gallery. His work is in several private collections in both the United States and Europe. Marcos Bontempo: Dancing in the Void will be on view at Ricco/Maresca May 16- June 15, 2013.

The Cut
 
The cut on her face
The blood from under her skirt
A red fountain carries me
Towards my destiny
 
The cut in the sky
Out pour father‘s eyes
Dive deep in the snow
Cold seed for the spring
Harvest of my creativity
 
The cut on her face
Portal of our race
Spurned majesty sighs
For that cut!
 
Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present The Cut, a solo exhibition of work by Antony on view from May 31st through July 12th, 2013.
 
Antony has created a body of work including drawing, collage, and sculpture alongside his critically acclaimed musical career as both a singer and composer. Both his music and visual art are marked by intuitive and accumulative practices that reflect a shared visual and psychological vocabulary. The initial inspiration that provided the framework for the exhibition was a poem written by the artist entitled The Cut, which describes the source of creation as a slit in the sky. The marks that the artist makes on the surface of his artwork can at once be understood as scars as well as applications that have the ability to heal the surface of the paper, fabric, or canvas. A delicate line can be juxtaposed with a harsh application of paint or a torn edge. Many of the works are intimate in scale and ephemeral in their materiality, but they are monumental in the emotional depth that they convey. Like Joseph Beuys, Antony’s work originates in personal experience yet it also addresses universal artistic or social ideas and poetically suggests the healing potential of art.
 
Born in Chichester, West Sussex, England in 1971, Antony currently lives and works in New York. Since 2000, he has released four studio albums with his band Antony and the Johnsons. A special edition of the band’s 2010 album Swanlights was accompanied by a book published by Abrams Image featuring drawings and collages by Antony as well as photographs by Don Felix Cervantes in collaboration with Antony. Solo exhibitions of his artwork have been presented at Isis Gallery, London in 2009 and The Armand Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles in 2012. His work was included in It’s not only Rock’n’Roll, Baby! presented at BOZAR, Brussels in 2008 and at the Triennale Bovisa, Milan in 2010. In 2009 he curated the group show 6 Eyes at galerie du jour agnès b., Paris. Antony’s performance projects include Miracle Now (1996); TURNING (2004/2006), in collaboration with Charles Atlas; and The Crying Light (2009). Antony was musical director of The Life and Death of Marina Abramović (2011) in collaboration with Abramović and Robert Wilson. Commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, his performance Swanlights debuted at Radio City Music Hall in 2012.

Skoto Gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition of photographic works by ten Nigerian artists who are among a new generation of African photographers that explore unique visions, strong emotional and aesthetic perspectives to tell their own stories and challenge assumptions about the African continent. Each of the artists is widely traveled and well exposed to Western art modernism both by training and contact. Each represents a resonant voice, one that achieves it's own distinction and clarity amidst changing realities. Their creative voices are simultaneously instrumental, reconstructive if not interrogative and in some cases seek to retrieve both individual and collective memory. For many of the artists, this would be their first show in New York.
 
The reception is on Thursday, May 30th, 6-8pm
 
GO-SLOW: Diaries of Personal and Collective Stagnation in Lagos
New Directions in Contemporary Photography
 
Aderemi Adegbite
Ade Adekola
Akintunde Akinleye
Uche James Iroha
Chriss Nwobu
Adeniyi Odeleye
Abraham Oghobase
Charles Okereke
Uche Okpa-Iroha
Adeola Olagunju
 
Exhibition dates: May 30th - July 31st, 2013
 
In spite of the dynamic, lively, and often intensely volatile elements of life in Nigeria’s largest city, all who live there share in a daily narrative of delay. Lagosians experience go-slow in the form of impenetrable traffic jams, on the part of political leaders who make promises quickly followed by excuses, and when even a simple task becomes a major undertaking.
 
While the phenomenon of go-slow is a common cultural reference, its effects and impacts are as individual as the people who experience them, resulting in reactions that range from frustration, exhaustion, and anxiety to resignation, acceptance, and innovation in the face of a seemingly immutable reality.
 
Most showing for the first time in New York, ten Nigerian photographers explore the particular phenomenon of the Lagos go-slow through the context of personal or collective experiences demonstrating a keen awareness of the role that photography plays in strengthening the crucial links between culture, politics, and social agency.
 
Curator: Amber Croyle
 
10 LIVELY FRAMES - ONE SUBJECT: GO-SLOW-GO-SLOW
 
“Go-slow: Diaries of Personal and Collective Stagnation in Lagos”, as this photography exhibition is titled and focused, is a reality as well as a metaphor for the drudgery that characterizes diverse aspects of structural mobility in cosmopolitan Lagos. Fela Anikulakpo-Kuti, the veteran Afro-beat musician, satirist and social critic in 1978 put out a record track titled “Go-Slow”. The track explored the metaphoric gradations of “Go-Slow” as a reality in the day to day life of the Lagosian. The refrain of the track “go-slow, go-slow” aptly conjured the truth of the phenomenon while assuming landmark status of a resonating rhyme in the collective consciousness of Nigerians.
 
The diverse social and historical contexts that frame this seeming eternal characterization of Lagos have often provided photographers the contexts to invest their creative time and thoughts. The result is a corpus that keys into the testament projected by the city of Lagos as it allows for the exploration of the nuances of “go-slow” beyond a spatial identity.
 
The lively frames that the concept “go-slow” yields are thus presented in this exhibition from the experiences or encounters of cosmopolitan Lagos by the artists. Thus, from Aderemi Adegbite, Ade Adekola, Akintunde Akinleye, Uche James Iroha, Chriss Nwobu to Adeniyi Adeleye, Abraham Oghobase, Charles Okereke, Uche Okpa Iroha and Adeola Olagunju comes a bouquet of visual interpretations of the Lagos “go-slow” experience in representational and conceptual frames.
 
The exhibition plan designed to introduce to the New York audience “new directions in contemporary photography” by a crop of modern generation photographers from Nigeria is apt considering how identities are constructed. However, this objective presupposes a hierarchy that hosts these artists. Hence, I engage a brief narrative which situates the genre in Nigeria. Early uses of photography in the West Coast of Africa, from Gambia to Nigeria were documentary commissions from the English colonial authorities (Erin Harney, 2010). These include the works of J. P. Decker, a Gambian, and N. Walwin Holm, a Ghanaian who had a branch of his photography studio in Lagos. Apart from the portraitures associated with his studio, he also worked for the British as a documentary photographer. A Nigerian of note of Ijo nativity from Bonny, Jonathan Adagogo Green (1873 – 1905) was similarly engaged by the British colonial administration in Nigeria. His many choreographed portraits and group images are counted among over three hundred photographs from his atelier between 1897 and 1905. One of his very famous works that entrenches the memory of the British punitive expedition against Benin City is the apparently dehumanized Ovoramwen N’gbaisi, the Oba of Benin in the expedition year 1897.
 
It is interesting to note that Adagogo Green’s seal for his photographs bore his name with an added inscription; “Artist Photographer”. In spite of this claim, considering also the strong foregrounding of photography in the practice of the visual arts, it is only recently that its status as high art was acclaimed. This recognition has inspired new initiatives to track the multilayered history of the genre in Nigeria. Equally, exhibitions of photography now compete with those of other arts. However, an austere history of photography in Nigeria accommodates the following personalities; George S. A. Da Costa, J. D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, Dotun Okubanjo, Sunmi Smart-Cole and Don Berber. Don Berber is, within this history, a mentor to many new generation photographers who have featured in this exhibition with their visual interpretation of go-slow in Lagos.
 
In reality, the history of photography in Nigeria is in tandem with the global history of photography. This is that photography, as an expressive mode that documents phenomena as fleeting time permits, is governed by epistemes, which are palimpsest, and allow a loose ordering of identities. The image-turn, which is on the ascent in the contemporary, bears witness to deep creative exploits with the lens and the digital interface. Invariably the production and consumption of images in the artistic-scape in Nigeria has remained strong probably because of the power of the image to determine our demands upon reality. These realities shape the metaphors of focus here their enduring vehicular and often pedestrian gridlocks. This is Lagos.
 
Frank Ugiomoh, 2013
Art Historian
University of Port Harcourt
Port Harcourt, Nigeria

Stux Gallery is delighted to announce Not a Rose, a solo exhibition of photographs by neo- conceptual artist Heide Hatry. Seamlessly juxtaposing flowers assembled from grotesque, immaculately manicured flesh debris and picturesque, nonchalant nature, Hatryʼs works bring aesthetics and ethics into an explosive head-on collision that is both conceptually corrosive and visually arresting.
Hatryʼs serene scenes of flowers are actually photographs of trompe lʼoeil arrangements of the offal, sex organs and other residues of deceased animals. Their simple compositions almost recall scientific illustrations, whose directed focus on the flowersʼ anatomy heightens their fragrant aroma and delicate beauty. Her commitment to recreating the physical beauty of flowers renders the viewerʼs realization of the photographs' true materiality particularly jarring. The instantaneity of photography confronts the ephemeral blossoms with the persistent momentum of death and decay, and invites viewers to interrogate our cultural conception of flowers and their function as, essentially, “sex organs for plants”. Elegant yet deeply disturbing, these works call into question the foundations of aesthetic perception (and perception in general) and the ethics of our use and abuse of living animal-plant nature.
This exhibition at Stux coincides with the new CHARTA publication: Heide Hatry, Not a Rose, which addresses the nature of our relationship to flowers with unprecedented scope. Her images and the writing of 101 prominent intellectuals, writers, and artists together channel Richard Wagnerʼs pursuit of the “Gesamtkunstwerk”, an interdisciplinary “total artwork” that offers a dynamic, holistic expression of its subject that is not constrained by the division between contemporary artistic genres. Contributing writers include Jonathan Ames, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jessica Hagedorn, Donna Haraway, Siri Hustvedt, Lucy Lippard, Robert Kelly, Kate Millett, Rick Moody, Steven Pinker, Avital Ronell, Stanley Rosen, Peter Singer, Klaus Theweleit, Franz Wright, and Luisa Valenzuela.
 
-Lucy Li
 
For further information please contact the gallery at andrea@stuxgallery.com.

Susan Inglett Gallery is pleased to present new works by Marcia Kure in her second solo exhibition with the Gallery from 9 May to 15 June 2013. A reception for the artist will be held Thursday evening, 9 May from 6 to 8 PM.
 
—
 
We feel content and safe within the confines of the world we understand. “Tease” intends to poke holes, cut into, and fragment the perceptual matrix that is our world; daring the viewer to imagine existential possibilities beyond the familiar and the ordinary. “Tease” is a populated space, a universe of hybrid bodies and masked and secret things existing at the very edges of our daily lives.
 
The realities described by drawings, collages and sculptures in “Tease” are only imaginable through access to terrifying and exhilarating knowledge-knowledge we gain by prying open the locked closet, gazing into the dark sky, chanting a ritual song, or opening closed windows of the mind.
 
With familiar objects such as children's toys, kitchen utensils, bed sheets, rugs, and other common household items, “Tease” probes our fear of the unknown and the hidden, and tickles the pleasure of revelation. It asks the question: to what extent does the acquisition of more knowledge contribute to the (un-)making of the human? What is the existential value of curiosity, that primal urge to peer into the unknown? What desires are fulfilled or lost in encounters with partially obscured images and objects on the verge of disappearance/recovery?
 
“Tease” is a place of possibility, a space of becoming; it is an unsettling, off-kilter space, not unlike the world outside. It is at the moment of our greatest discomfort when we are compelled to ask the most important questions about our lives, and our world.
 
“Tease” is that place.
 
- Marcia Kure
 
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Born in Nigeria, Marcia Kure has appeared in museum and gallery exhibitions in Nigeria, Germany, the United States, Spain, the Netherlands, United Arab Emirates, Japan, Canada, Austria, and Switzerland. Most recently her work was featured at the Palais de Tokyo in the Paris Triennial 2012; “The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo Kuti” at The New Museum, NYC; The 7th Sharjah Biennale; and the 2nd Seville International Biennial curated by Okwui Enwezor. Reviews have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, the New York Observer, Time Out, Frieze, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, African Arts and Flash Art among others. The work will be exhibited next in a three person exhibition at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City in the Fall.
 
The exhibition will be on view at the gallery located 522 West 24 Street Tuesday to Saturday 10 AM to 6 PM. For additional information please contact Susan Inglett Gallery at 212/647-9111, or info@inglettgallery.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Tracy Williams, Ltd. is pleased to present Richard Dupont’s third solo exhibition with the
gallery, Shadow Work. The exhibition will consist of a variety of new works in bas-relief:
sculptural enlargements of small handmade burlap paintings, altered vacuum-formed rubber
and vinyl topographical maps, and poured and peeled silicone rubber reliefs. Shadow Work
invites a variety of readings, from references to Jungian psychology, mapping and surveillance,
and the Austrian philosopher and social critic Ivan Illich’s 1981 book, Shadow Work.
For Sacco (1) and Sacco (2), Dupont used a high-resolution scanner to laser scan a small
series of elemental canvases in burlap and gesso, enlarged the originals roughly 500%, and
cast the results in white resin and marble dust. The ensuing monochromatic reliefs open up
dynamic new spaces of inquiry for Dupont: They engage abstract painting as a dialogue with
external methods and meanings, sample aspects of collage and the readymade, and extend
elements of performance into the art object. Collapsing hierarchies of media, these works are
part digital enlargement, part sculpture, and part painting. As the titles suggest, the works may
allude to Alberto Burri’s Sacco paintings, which he began making on discarded sugar sacks
while interned in an American prisoner of war camp after the Second World War.
The exhibition also includes new work based on U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) topographic
relief maps and large-scale West German relief maps. With origins in territorial boundaries, the
USGS—along with several other international bodies—has now surveyed and mapped via
aerial scanning every inch of the earth’s surface. Dupont inverts and embosses the backside of
these found rubber maps with cryptic titles appropriated from Walt Whitman poems, which he
translates into binary code. In doing so, he creates objects that are at once Orwellian and
transcendental.
Issues of mapping are further explored in Shadow Aspect (light) and Shadow Aspect (dark).
Dupont brushed rubber over a positive form based on a scan of his head, and then peeled the
rubber away as if a “skin.” Visceral and process oriented, these “skins” were collected and
assembled on wood panels, and then additional silicone was brushed and poured over them.
More unconscious and spontaneous than deliberate, the forms within these compositions may
have derived originally from a digital replica of the body, but ultimately devolve into the
scatological and formless.
Defined largely by dialectical juxtapositions, these works present simultaneous contradictory
conditions: light and dark, revealing and concealing, seen and unseen, natural and industrial,
the thing itself and its representation, the two dimensional and the three dimensional, and the
handmade and the machine made. They also extend Dupont’s exploration of the techniques of
digital and computer-assisted fabrication, as well as the broader social uses and implications
of these processes. As the critic Hunter Braithwaite writes, “In 2004, [Dupont] traveled to
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, in order to truly map his body. This endeavor,
which at first seems like a Whitmanesque pilgrimage of self-discovery, is mediated through the
contemporary American military-industrial complex…the resulting data used to construct a
‘surrogate body’ is normally sold to arms contractors making blast helmets and flack jackets.
It’s also sold to big-box retailers such as the Gap looking to design clothing to fit target
demographics….the same research is equally applied to the clothing and the destruction of the
body.”1
Dupont’s work of the past few years has been characterized by strong visceral and material
content and a process-oriented approach. As he recently wrote, “I have always been much
more interested in physical, material residue than information, but technology is a great tool as
long as you disrespect it…using things, whether ideologies, machines or materials, in ways
that they were not meant to be used, can be a good way to work.”2
This fall, Richard Dupont’s work will be included in Out of Hand (Materializing the Postdigital) at
New York’s Museum of Arts and Design. His solo museum exhibitions include The Middlebury
College Museum of Art (2011) and the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art (2008). His
work is included in the permanent collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, The
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Brooklyn Museum, The San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, The Hammer Museum, The Cleveland Museum of Art, The New York Public Library Print
Collection, and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) among many others.
In addition to Shadow Work at Tracy Williams, Ltd., Richard Dupont will present a
simultaneous solo show at Carolina Nitsch Project Room, Going Around by Passing
Through, opening also on May 2 from 6-8 pm. The exhibitions will run concurrently and
will both consist of entirely new works in various media.
For more information, please call 212.229.2757 or email jacqueline@tracywilliamsltd.com.
1 Hunter Braithwaite, “Surveiling The Relics” World Sculpture News, January 2012
2 Richard Dupont, “Biopic” Modern Painters, April 2013

HANSJOERG DOBLIAR: “HYSTERIE UND ABSTRAKTION”

May 3 – June 15, 2013
 
Johannes Vogt Gallery is pleased to announce German artist Hansjoerg Dobliar’s first solo show with the gallery, Hysterie und Abstraktion (Hysteria and Abstraction). For the exhibition, Dobliar presents a new body of paintings on canvas and aluminum. Additionally the artist has designed an immersive wallpaper scheme for the rear room that serves as backdrop for an installation of paintings.
 
Dobliar’s paintings engage with the oil medium on a very material level. In his works, Dobliar builds up thick but fluid brushstrokes to form images. Dobliar’s practice strongly recalls and builds upon the traditions of German expressionism. In Dobliar’s engagement with abstraction, he enlivens the tension between figuration and abstraction. Subjects can be recognized, but only uncertainly, as if through a haze. In this way, he prioritizes the expressive handling of the material, neither blending his strokes to render his hand invisible, nor abandoning a subject in favor of pure abstraction. The expressionist brushstroke is understood for its ornamental value. This exchange is a theme also explored in his works on paper. By overpainting onto old magazine pages, Dobliar selectively obscures and represses the figures in these images. By intervening in the imagery of mass circulation, Dobliar symbolically questions cultural narratives, and the ways in which reality is undermined by myth.
 
Among the works in the front gallery is a series of small paintings on canvas. Referred to by Dobliar as the “dot paintings,” these works appear like a series of bullseyes, or a string of echoed permutations. In exploring a similar composition over a large number of small canvases, Dobliar enacts the decorative concealment of abstraction, and expresses a fixation with the aesthetic surface. These issues of representation and presentation also inform his practice of designing the manner in which his works are displayed. Previously, Dobliar has installed wallpaper, constructed shelving, and painted on the walls to modify the atmosphere in which his works are received. Dobliar continues this practice for his show at the gallery.
 
Dobliar’s vibrant paintings evoke the psychic worlds of the subjective experience. In his energetic and tactile engagement with the paint, Dobliar creates works that point beyond the limits of our knowledge, and force the viewer to ask where the abstraction ends and their projection begins.
 
Hansjoerg Dobliar was born in Ulm, Germany in 1970. Dobliar's work has been exhibited internationally, including Sammlung Rheingold at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Sammlung Falckenberg / Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Daniel Hug Gallery, Los Angeles; Kunstverein Oldenburg; and Beijing Biennale. Recent solo exhibitions include Sies + Höke gallery, Düsseldorf; Galerie Akinci, Amsterdam; Galerie Ben Kaufmann, Berlin as well as a solo presentation at INDEPENDENT art fair in New York in 2011. He lives and works in Munich and Berlin.
 
Since its inception only two years ago, the gallery has taken on a challenging program leading to a change of location in November 2012. Johannes Vogt Gallery is committed to bringing attention to the complex artistic and cultural ties that bind New York to both Europe and Latin America.
 
Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 11 am – 6 pm and by appointment
 
For further details please contact Samuel Draxler at samuel@vogtgallery.com or at 212.255.2671

FEATURING
Matthew Brandt
John Chiara
Pierre Cordier & Gundi Falk
Agnes Eperjesi
Curtis Mann
Klea McKenna
Amanda Means
Floris Neusüss
 
Von Lintel Gallery is pleased to present UNIQUE, a group show of non-editioned photography. Often made without negatives or a camera, the exhibited work is created with unique and diverse techniques that result in one-of-a-kind photographs. The included artists represent several generations, including Pierre Cordier and Floris Neusüss, who have been pioneers in the field of camera-less, unique photography since the 1950s.
In 1956, the Belgian artist Pierre Cordier invented the chemigram, a technique that employs resists to protect areas of the photosensitive paper from successive submersion in developer and fixer. Since 2011, Cordier has collaborated with the Austrian painter Gundi Falk. Floris Neusüss, a German photographer, explores the technical and visual possibilities of the photogram to create an innovative body of work that includes ethereal silhouettes of nude women and mysterious images of the natural world at night. Cordier and Neusüss share a spirit of experimentation and a desire to explore the infinite possibilities inherent to the chemistry of photographic paper and processes with the younger artists in the show. Following in Cordier’s chemigram tradition, Amanda Means delicately scores light-sensitive paper with a grid pattern and flows developer over it, creating organic abstract compositions that are inspired by her close connection with nature. Means worked for many years as a master printmaker for other artists, including Robert Mapplethorpe, and the fluid process she employs is liberating in contrast with the exacting precision that work required. Matthew Brandt uses the subjects of his Western landscape photographs as ingredients in their production. He soaks images of lakes in water from the same source, distorting colors and abstracting the captured vistas. John Chiara travels the California coastline with a room-size camera obscura of his own creation hitched to his car, capturing landscapes directly on photographic paper. His method invites exposure and processing anomalies, making the process part of the imagery. Although he starts with representational photographs, like Brandt and Chiara, Curtis Mann moves toward abstraction by obstructing journalistic scenes of conflict with chemically etched circles and stripes. Drawing on the tradition of photograms of the human body and of the natural world that Neusüss explores, Klea McKenna uses light-sensitive paper to capture images of elements, such as raindrops, while the Hungarian photographer Agnes Eperjesi projects multilayered and brightly colored shadows of hands, flowers, and household objects.
 
For further information or visual materials, please see vonlintel.com or contact the gallery at (212) 242-0599 or gallery@vonlintel.com.

African Photography from The Walther Collection
 
Distance and Desire:
Encounters with the African Archive
 
June 9, 2013 – May 17, 2015
 
The Walther Collection
Reichenauerstrasse 21
Neu-Ulm, Burlafingen 89233
Germany
info@walthercollection.com
www.walthercollection.com
 
The Walther Collection is pleased to present “Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive,” the third exhibition devoted to African photography and video art. This exhibition, curated by Tamar Garb, brings together late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century portraits, cartes de visite, postcards, album pages, and books from Southern and Eastern Africa, set in dialogue with recent photography and video by contemporary artists who have engaged with photographic archives. “Distance and Desire” offers new perspectives on the legacy of anthropological and ethnographic visions of Africans, reimagining the poetic and political dimension of the archive, its diverse histories, and its changing meanings. The culmination of a three-part exhibition series at The Walther Collection Project Space in New York, and the international symposium “Encounters with the African Archive,” co-organized by The Walther Collection, New York University, and University College London, the exhibition is accompanied by a major scholarly catalogue edited by Tamar Garb.
 
“Distance and Desire” unfolds in three thematic sections:
 
“Santu Mofokeng and A.M. Duggan-Cronin”
A juxtaposition of A. M. Duggan-Cronin’s “The Bantu Tribes of South Africa” and Santu Mofokeng’s “The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890–1950” introduces the concept of the photographic archive as both a repository of documents and an assemblage of representations. Duggan-Cronin, an Irish South African who lived in the mining town of Kimberley, set out to depict what he considered the disappearing indigenous populations of South Africa. His monumental study, entitled “The Bantu Tribes of South Africa,” published between 1928-1954, includes photographs, descriptive captions, and anthropological essays. In addition to presenting all eleven Bantu Tribes books, a complete sequence of photogravure plates from “The Nguni: Baca, Hlubi, Xesibe” (1954) will be on view, alongside a selection of vintage gelatin-silver prints by Duggan-Cronin, which had previously circulated as individual objects.
 
In contrast to Duggan-Cronin’s renowned and contested ethnographic vision of African heritage, “The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890-1950” portrays the modern self-representation of African subjects. In the early 1990s, the artist Santu Mofokeng collected family studio portraits from late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century South Africa and transformed the images into a slide show, complete with narratives about the sitters. He also produced a series of gelatin-silver print reproductions of the portraits, which are on view together with a selection of the project’s original vintage prints and Mofokeng’s research notes. Envisioned as a “counter-archive,” The Black Photo Album challenges fixed ideas most often associated with images of Africans.
 
“Poetics and Politics”
The cornerstone of Distance and Desire is a presentation of previously un-exhibited vintage portraits, cartes de visite, postcards, and album pages, produced from the 1860s to the early twentieth century. Extraordinary in range and style, these images make visible both the ideological frameworks that prevailed during the colonial period in Africa and the exceptional skill of photographers working in the studio and landscape. “Poetics and Politics” offers a remarkable opportunity to view the narratives that emerge from this African photographic archive, describing in particular the experience of the studio: the curiosity between photographer and subject, the emergence and circulation of types, the range of portraiture, the negotiations of costume and pose, and the will for self-assertion.
 
The presentation investigates typical European depictions of Africans, from scenes in nature, to sexualized images of semi-nude models, to modern sitters posing in elaborate studios, critically addressing the politics of colonialism and the complex issues of gender, race, and identity. Original album pages of landscapes and ethnographic imagery are displayed alongside a series of carte de visite portraits of Africans, circulated in the 1870s from the Diamond Fields of Kimberley and popular “ethnic” post-cards from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The exhibition also features several double-sided displays of album pages, showing striking combinations of personal and stock images, and the juxtapositions of prominent figures in both African and Western contexts. Among over 150 images, the exhibition includes some of the finest examples of works by Samuel Baylis Barnard and the Lawrence Brothers of Cape Town, George T. Ferneyhough and the Caney Brothers in Natal, Barnett & Co from Johannesburg, W. Rausch from Bulawayo, and G. F. Williams from Port Elizabeth, as well as images by unidentified and unattributed photographers.
 
“Contemporary Reconfigurations”
Centering on contemporary photography and video by African and African-American artists who have engaged with photographic archives, “Contemporary Reconfigurations” shows how a stereotype or ethnographic vision in one era provides material for an irreverent reworking, satirical performance, or elegiac reenactment in another. Carrie Mae Weems, in her powerful series “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried,” appropriates mid-nineteenth-century anthropometric photographs of African-Americans, overlaying the images with poetic texts. Sammy Baloji, Candice Breitz, and Sue Williamson rework historic or ethnographic photographs onto collages. Samuel Fosso, Philip Kwame Apagya, and Kudzanai Chiurai create exuberantly staged studio portraiture, using backdrops and sets to critique stereotypes and identities. Zwelethu Mthethwa and Zanele Muholi examine sexuality, costume, and ritual, while David Goldblatt’s and Jo Ractliffe’s black-and-white portraits portray mineworkers and former military personnel as they chose to been seen in “traditional” clothing.
 
Sabelo Mlangeni’s photo essay “Iimbali” documents the reed dances of KwaZulu-Natal, showing the display of virgins vying to be chosen as brides. His series “Country Girls,” in contrast to the multiple visions of women posed “in nature” throughout the ethnographic archive, chronicles small-town transvestites who self-consciously perform their adopted identities for the camera. Pieter Hugo’s series “There’s a Place in Hell for Me & My Friends” examines ethnicity and skin tones through mug shots and Guy Tillim makes a typology of child soldiers training near Beni, in the eastern Congo. Jodi Bieber, in a reversal of previous voyeuristic visions of the black female body, presents women self-consciously posing in settings where they are in control of their own images. Working in video, Berni Searle performs as a statuesque deity engaged in domestic labor in “Snow White,” and Andrew Putter gives an indigenous voice to the effigy of Maria de la Quellerie, wife of the first Dutch settler in the area known today as Cape Town, in “Secretly I Will Love You More.” Together, through their work with the African archive, these artists pose compelling questions about identity and memory, leading to new readings of the exhibition’s vintage photographs.