Gilles's work in SF Camerawork's annual benefit auction

dnj Gallery artist, Richard Gilles, will have his work featured and up for bid at SF Camerawork's annual benefit auction this December.

Richard Gilles, Lamar 001, 2008, archival inkjet print, 21" x 48" and 13" x 28"

SF Camerawork's annual benefit auction is one of their largest fundraisers. If you find yourself in the Bay Area before December 6, try to stop by SFC and see Richard Gilles's featured work during their art preview. If you can attend the auction on November 7, please consider helping to support this non-profit photography organization.


Can't make it to the auction? dnj has some of Gilles's work at the gallery. If interested please contact us.

Opening Reception with Dylan Vitone and Richard Gilles

"They owe something to the Bechers, perhaps, but their fictional duplicity rings true as markers of the lonely landscape where everything needs another just to stand by." -Buzz Spector on Richard Gilles


Here are some snapshots of our most recent opening reception with dnj artists Dylan Vitone and Richard Gilles:

Thank you to all who made it to our opening reception!

Congratulations to dnj Gallery artists, Richard Gilles and Dale Johnson!

Richard Gilles and Dale Johnson are among the 20 finalists for the Emerging Focus International Photography Competition. They will be premiered at Photo LA which runs from January 12-16, 2012.

Richard Gilles Exhibition

dnj Gallery artist, Richard Gilles, is opening a solo show of never before seen images taken during public demonstrations on the streets of San Francisco at Axis Gallery in Sacramento this Saturday, March 12th from 6-9pm.

Titled Had Enough? (and other questions of pride) - Photographs from the 90s, the majority of Richard's images were taken during the annual gay pride parades. It is a question of pride that brings most people out onto the street for public displays of their beliefs in an attempt to bring the spotlight on a problem or an inequity.

If you are in the area be sure to stop by and take part in this historically relevant exhibition.



Axis Gallery
1517 19th Street, Sacramento, CA 95811
info@axisgallery.org
916.443.9900
Hours: Saturday & Sunday 12pm to 5pm or by appointment

Ricahrd Gilles News

A big congratulations to DNJ Gallery artist, Richard Gilles, for his upcoming inclusion in two group shows! If you like what you see, please stop by the gallery to see some of Richard's work in person.

The first show titled, Photo-Environment, will take place in Costa Mesa at the Orange Cost College in the Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion, and will run from September 8 - October 20, 2010. Richard will be showing 9 images from his Signs of the Times series during this exhibition. (see below)


Richard Gilles, Peckman 3040s, archival inkjet print, 2009, 21" x 48"


The second show titled, Wonderers, will be held at the University of California Davis in the Richard L. Nelson Gallery, and will run from October 7- December 12, 2010. Richard will be showing 8 images from his Almost Home-Less series during this exhibition. (see below)


Richard Giles, Addison & Second, archival inkjet print, 14" x 36"

Artist Talk and Closing Reception

Please join DNJ Gallery for an artist talk with Richard Gilles on Saturday, March 6th from 4-4:30 pm. The talk will coincide with the closing reception for the exhibitions, "Signs of the Times" and "Laundry Lines" featuring the work of Richard Gilles and Bernadette DiPietro. Refreshments and wine will be provided.

Forth Magazine Reviews Richard Gilles and Bernadette DiPietro's Artist Reception

Richard Gilles, Mad Greek, 2008, archival inkjet print, 21" x 48"


Bernadette DiPietro, Alter, Do Charo, Brazl, 1999, digital c-print, 8" x 12"

By: Elizabeth Manson

I may not know great photography, but I know what I like. Luckily, this was both (I have the former on good authority).

This past Saturday, January 23, was DNJ’s opening reception for two photography exhibits: Richard Gilles’s “Signs of the Times” and Bernadette DiPeitro’s “Laundry Lines.”

This cozy gallery lends itself perfectly to this sort of exhibition reception; it’s made for those who want to walk in, grab complimentary free wine and (awesome) cookies (seriously, try the cashew ones), and hit the two photograph-filled rooms to ogle, shop, and mingle. The crowd was mostly older and sophisticated, comprised of those that had a decorating budget and a taste for fine photography, and knew how to use them. I, with my nonexistent decorating budget, was just there to look.

The premise for DiPietro’s “Laundry Lines” is simple: photos of laundry lines from around the world. It seems like everyone has laundry to air out, from several pairs of underwear hanging in Ojai, California to socks, shirts, and pants drying in exotic places like Brazil, Vietnam, and Malaysia. (I expressed my envy of being able to travel to so many places to which she explained that she had been an art teacher on a cruise….sweet gig). I suppose that I should say something meaningful about how laundry is the world’s great equalizer, and I should somehow compare it to the idiom of ‘airing out one’s dirty laundry in public,’ but, frankly, I was just captivated with what all these people were wearing.

The larger exhibition room was reserved for Gilles’s massive panoramic photographs. Again, the theme for “Signs of the Times” is rather simple: (mostly) blank billboards standing abandoned in various backdrops including deserts and cityscapes. There’s something poignant about seeing an empty CBS-sponsored billboard next to a lone, run-down farmhouse. Or the starkly artificial negative space created by a giant white sign in the natural terrain of mountains and deserts. I feel like I should use the word “juxtaposition” somewhere, but I think I’ll avoid it. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but think about the meaning behind the work: is it a sign of our times that commercial advertising is invading our most natural and awe-inspiring landscapes, or that they’re all blank? You be the judge.

WHO: Richard Gilles and Bernadette DiPietro
WHAT: “Signs of the Times” and “Laundry Lines” opening reception at DNJ Gallery
WHERE: DNJ Gallery
ADDRESS: 154 ½ North La Brea Avenue
WHEN: January 23, 6-8 P.M.
EXHIBITION DATES: January 23-March 6
WEBSITE: www.dnjgallery.net

LENSCRATCH Reviews Richard Gilles

Friday, January 22, 2010


Richard Gilles, Mad Greek, 2008, archival inkjet print, 21 x 48 inches


After spending the winter holidays with a house full of tech savvy off-spring that were tuned in and connected to anything electronic at all times, coming across Richard Gilles' work of empty bill boards brings a sense of relief and calm to a world that is over saturated with information. Richard's previous series, Almost Home-less, was selected for an Honorable Mention in the Aperture Portfolio Prize, and his new series, Signs of the Times, opens at the DNJ Gallery in Los Angeles this Saturday, January 23 through March 6th, 2010.

Born in Georgia and now living in Folsom, California, Richard is an observer of the American landscape. He manages to synthesize the affect of man on the landscape from his projects about empty signage to highway memorials in his series, The Highway Remembers. His work reflects someone that spends a lot of time on the road, and uses that time to process what he is seeing.

Outdoor advertising, or billboards as they are more commonly known are everywhere. They constantly bombard us with messages to buy. They are in some ways a reflection of our society and economy. In fact, the outdoor advertising industry's own trade publication is called Signs of the Times.

With this new series of photographs, I am exploring what these signs say about us or to us when they are empty. Is a blank billboard an advertisement for an economic decline? Or is it a minimalist object whose message is only that which viewer brings to it?

Richard Gilles Review

DNJ Gallery artist, Richard Gilles, and his show titled, Signs of the Times, was recently featured on SQUARE CYLINDER.com. Richard will be showing this body of work here at DNJ starting January 23 - March 6, 2010, so make sure to stop by for a visit!


Richard Gilles, Peckman 3040s, digital inkjet print, 21" x 57"


Richard Gilles, Ad America, digital inkjet print, 21" x 57"

By: David M. Roth
Posted on 13 December 2009

Wherever you find abandoned buildings, cyclone fences, razor wire, graffiti, dirt tracks, lonesome highways and homeless living in cars – that’s where you’ll find Richard Gilles: camera in hand, making panoramic pictures out of vistas that are everything but picturesque.

His latest series, Signs of the Times, on view at b. sakata garo through Jan. 2, Gilles consists of empty billboards that show what remains when advertising’s projection of desire is short-circuited by a lack of cash. At first glance, you might wonder how much juice can be squeezed from so hollow a fruit. But here, as in prior projects of this sort, Gilles reaps big harvests from a deceptively simple approach. Rather than aim for indictments or sweeping statements, he lets photography’s deadpan power – its natural adhesion to fact — do the heavy lifting. Signs doesn’t just speak about our soured
economy; its vacant billboards and desolate landscapes speak of economic and environmental hubris as well as a kind of spiritual vacuum in regions where billboards fill the 70-mile-an-hour gap between cities, suburbs, mountains and farmland. (These shots were taken in California and Nevada.)

This, of course, is not new territory. Photographers from Walker Evans and Robert Frank to Stephen Shore have wrung the pictorial equivalent of novels from signs that commented slyly, ironically or nonsensically on their surroundings. So have many of the New Topographics photographers. Gilles definitely stands on their shoulders. But his work also seems to be aligned with the sensibilities of contemporary chroniclers like Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth, artists whose monumental banalities magnify nothingness to wall-sized dimensions. There is also a link between Gilles and the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher whose career-length obsession with industrial structures serves as a kind of template. I’d be remiss, too, if I didn’t mention Hiroshi Sugimoto’s time-lapse movie theatre pictures. Gilles’ vacant billboards really do resemble Sugimoto’s blank movie screens — even if the motivations of the two artists are worlds apart.

Gilles, unlike the purveyors of super-sized prints to which the art market, before the crash, became addicted, shows emptiness at a reduced scale; his largest pictures are 27” x 57”. They’re not small, but they’re small enough to force you to hunt for telling details. Do it and you’ll discover, in the 21 works on view here, things that push them beyond the ostensible subject of outdoor advertising’s demise.

Peckman 3040, an elevated freeway ramp flanked by two empty billboards is, from a formal standpoint, an extraordinary picture. The curve of the concrete and the shadow it casts, serve up sensuousness where you least expect it. You can marvel at it, but you can’t really savor it. The scale of the highway and the empty signs show the brutality inflicted by the auto on the landscape and how the vastness of the desert itself magnifies humanity’s insignificance in the greater scheme of things.

Perhaps the most interesting transformation highlighted by Signs is how billboards, when emptied of content, switch from being visual pollution to being blank slates on which viewers can project anything. Gilles probably didn’t intend this, but he certainly captures that potential when he photographs billboards outside cities at dusk. Pictures like Olympia 4547 show how, instead of arousing the desires of motorists, these blank screens seem to be lying in wait for passersby to engage in a little free-form culture jamming of their own – a fact underscored by the razor wire fence that guards the billboard in, another picture, Ad America. Look closely at this image and you’ll other important details, like a billboard for the 40 Deuces, a burlesque club, and a cluster of under-construction buildings that seem, in their unfinished state, to be waiting for time or circumstance to reclaim them, too.

I laughed when I saw Faddis 1100, a picture of a billboard situated on hairpin curve in a spot where no one, save the ambitious rubbernecker, can see it. The curvature of the sign, which mirrors the shape of the road, probably doesn’t exist. I suspect that when Gilles saw the ready-made joke before his lens he chose to enhance it by subtly altering the sign electronically, after the fact.

Like a comedian, Gilles recognizes that humor can say as much about a subject as a documentary treatise. Signs of the Times certainly does that.

Richard Gilles, Signs of the Times, at b. sakata garo through Jan. 2, 2010.

DNJ Gallery Holiday Editions Now Available

DNJ Gallery is pleased to present Holiday Miniature Editions - a special series of limited edition, photo-based works by eleven gallery artists. The works vary in size and edition, and range in price from $40- $100. A limited number of full-set editions are available for $500. Created to entice your inner art collector and encourage art-giving this holiday season, the miniatures provide an affordable way to build a contemporary photography collection. DNJ Miniatures are available for purchase individually or as a full set. Please contact the gallery for further information. office@dnjgallery.net

Click the Holiday Miniature link above or the artists links below to scroll through all available images.

Miniature works are available by:

Maria Luisa Morando, Annie Seaton, Jane O'Neal, Jona Frank, Richard Gilles, Darryl Curran, Laura Parker, Bernadette DiPietro, Anne Veraldi, Patrick Wymore and Dylan Vitone


Maria Luisa Morando


Annie Seaton


Jane O'Neal
See Environmental Memory: Part I - Home Grown
series for all available miniatures by Jane


Jona Frank


Richard Gilles


Darryl Curran
Images available in three colors shown


Laura Parker


Bernadette DiPietro
Call gallery for all available
miniaures by Bernadette


Anne Veraldi


Patrick Wymore


Dylan Vitone