Thursday, April 30, 2009
Opening reception for Jane O'Neal and Anne Veraldi
View photos from the opening below:
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Jane O'Neal and Anne Veraldi: Artist Reception Saturday April, 25 from 6 - 8 pm
DNJ Gallery is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition Environmental Memory: Part 1 - Home Grown featuring the photographs of Los Angeles artist Jane O'Neal. Gallery II features the work of Anne Veraldi in the show entitled Melting Point. Both exhibitions illustrate the artists' contemporary perception of their surroundings. This exhibition runs from April 25 - June 20, 2009.
44 x 44 inches, archival inkjet print
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Michael Eastman Featured at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art
Artists in the exhibition include Julie Blackmon, William Christenberry, William Clift, Lynn Davis, Terry Evans, Walker Evans, Michael Eastman, Todd Hido, Richard Hodgman, Anthony Lepore, Joel Meyerowitz, Neeta Madahar, Nicholas Prior, Milton Rogovin, Mike Sinclair, Aaron Siskind, and Paul Strand.
Inspired by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s book La poétique de l’espace (The Poetics of Space) (1958), this exhibition features photographs from the Kemper Museum’s permanent collection that focus on the spatial dynamics of our architectural and natural surroundings. Through photographs by William Christenberry, Lynn Davis, Walker Evans, Todd Hido, and Aaron Siskind, among others, the exhibition reveals the mysterious and poetic worlds dwelling within domestic, urban, and natural spaces.
Michael Eastman, Isabella's Two Chairs with Laundry 2000, c-print, 53 3/4 x 39 3/4 inches
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
ArtScene's recommended exhibition: Carlos and Jason Sanchez
The large-scale photographs of Carlos and Jason Sanchez examine the familial and the personal. The family fulfills traditional practices, with members consoling each other during times of loss. The individual however is left to navigate through the world alone when they seek to discover and unmask their own identity. The photographs navigate this through a Christening scene in which a mother dressed in sapphire blue garb resembling the Virgin Mary holds her child while he is blessed with holy water. What the parents and the priest fail to see, however, is a gaping bloody gash on the back of the child's head. A masked figure admires his newly cut ski mask in a hand mirror; an estranged man walks in the woods over forgotten train tracks. The deep focus and rich colors employed in Sanchez's photographs simply ask: what is our place in the world?
Holly Andres, "Sparrow Lane" reviewed in THE Magazine
Sparrow Lane, by Darrin Little
In Holly Andres' solo exhibition at DNJ Gallery, puberty anxiety never looked so good. This display of fifteen large-format color photographs and a wall installation (mirrors, candles, and smaller-framed photos) by the Portland-based artist dresses up pretty girls in storybook narratives to articulate awkward sexual development. Graced with a Pre-Raphaelite flare for dramatic gesture, rich color, scintillating detail and literary reference, Andres revels in female pubescence with an Alice in Wonderland brand of pathological voyeurism that would have delighted Lewis Carroll. But where Carroll was content to keep the "present" wrapped in both his literary fantasies and his obsessive photographs of young girls, Andres directs her starlets to pry loose the lid of the metaphorical box safeguarding illicit sexual consciousness.
Staged in and around "Grandma's house," these technically dazzling photographs function as melodramatic signposts guiding feminine somatics and psycho-social identity. Both these goals are bound here to maternal haunting (second-hand vintage clothes are worn in many of the scenes, suggesting mommy's wardrobe) and Eve's forbidden fruit transgression. In images like The Golden Pillow, The Glowing Drawer and The Red Purse, everyday objects become estrogenic metaphors that engender an awkward, conspiratorial sexual awareness. The empty birdcage in The Missing Bird testifies to the cost of this awakening: innocence lost. In The Secret Portal, these juvenescent prisoners start looking -- as we all must eventually -- for an escape route away from the nest and into the wider world, where carnal pleasures and fertility banking await.
Sparrow Lane is a Freudian-infested adventure overloaded with Victorian baggage. Underneath the sentimental aesthetics in all of the photographs (old locations, props, costumes) lurk prudish, mid-nineteenth century English notions of female purity and conduct. Andres turns immense contemporary psychosexual female identity challenges--the kinds faced head-on by fellow photographers like Lauren Greenfield (Girl Culture) -- into charming, easy-to-swallow yesterdays.
Eileen Cowin featured in ArtScene
In “You Thrill Me” photographer and video artist Eileen Cowin weaves sentimental love songs into vignettes that invite us to investigate her favorite binaries, fact verses fiction in public and private personal relationships. An attractive young blond, whose image is projected onto both sides of a large screen, sheds tears as she replays a televised love scene. The protagonist interacts with a series of four male actors, demonstrating her vulnerability in settings familiar to any movie fan. In Cowin’s skilled use of split screen staging, framing and cropping enrich the narrative, challenging us to separate truth from fiction. Sounds from this large, single channel video projection, “Sentimental Over You,” drift over to the other side of the gallery, coloring reactions to dual lines of eight video monitors hung at eye level.
With their barely animated head shots framed against blackened walls, relatives and acquaintances of the artist, male and female, at various stages of life, cycle through brief video loops, pausing at random to blow us a kiss (Pasadena City College Art Gallery, Pasadena).