Bridgette Mayer Gallery presents: “Experience of Place” with Ken Goldberg in the Vault Room
September 8 – October 30, 2015
Opening Reception: Friday, September 11, 6-8pm
PHILADELPHIA – The Bridgette Mayer Gallery is pleased to present, Experience of Place – a group show focused on the photographic medium, and how five distinct contemporary artists interpret ‘place’: from volcanic landscapes of Hawaii and New Mexico to abstract images from Germany, Costa Rica, France, and beyond. This exhibition features work by gallery artists Sharon Harper and Eileen Neff, in addition to Jessica Backhaus, Brea Souders, and Michael Eastman.
Using a visual language that balances the intimate and employs memory or personal constructions, alongside one that emphasizes the literal and objective, each of these artists investigate the notion of place through their own distinct style. Their poetic representation of space is conveyed via scale, form, and most importantly - light, which guides the viewer’s experience, and demonstrates photography’s power to transform, rather than simply document.
Exhibited works include an installation of five photographs by Eileen Neff, which juxtapose images created in her studio in anticipation of an artist residency in Costa Rica in 2014, alongside work resulting from her actual experience there. Each image draws from themes characteristic of her work – the exploration of boundaries separating the studio and the outside world, image/object, artist/viewer. Sharon Harper presents new work from her series ‘Volcanic’, which includes landscape images from Hawaii, New Mexico, and La Palma, Canary Islands. Also on view will be Harper’s ‘Watching the Rise for an Hour over the Grand Canyon, 2013,’ a work that changes the viewer’s perception of this iconic place with each frame. Jessica Backhaus contributes new works from her project ‘Six Degrees of Freedom’, employing a visual language that is intimate, and bringing the viewer in to experience a fleeting, vanishing moment. In Brea Souders’ series ‘Counterforms’, the artist utilizes models and materials that have significant meaning in her life and are connected to specific places: her childhood home, or her bedroom during a residency in France. Michael Eastman’s images are explorations of architectural form and the textures of decay unified by their visual precision, monumentality, and painterly use of color.
In the Vault Room, work by California based artist Ken Goldberg will accompany this exhibition. A digital work entitled 'Wow and Flutter' Ken Goldberg and Sanjay Krishnan and Yiming Jen, 2015 will explore how ground motion along the Hayward Fault in California is detected by a seismograph and transmitted continuously to mobile devices to generate evolving dynamic color fields.
On view beginning in October will be a never-before-seen work by Stephen Antonson and Ken Goldberg entitled, ‘Body in White’ 2015. This sculpture – a Plaster of Paris rendering of the now-classic PUMA industrial robot which was used extensively for research and automotive manufacturing – explores the concept of handcrafted versus computer generated.