Yossi Milo Gallery is pleased to announce our participation in PULSE Miami 2011, with a presentation of works by Simen Johan, Doug Rickard, Matthew Brandt, Pieter Hugo, Sze Tsung Leong, Alison Rossiter and Andrew Bush.
Simen Johan's ongoing series, Until the Kingdom Comes, depicts animals in an unsettling natural world hovering between reality and fantasy. He merges traditional photographic techniques with digital methods. Having originally photographed a variety of plants and animals in natural preserves, zoos, farms, museum dioramas or his own studio, the artist then places them digitally into new environments constructed from images photographed elsewhere. Johan blurs the boundaries between opposing forces, such as the familiar and the otherworldly, the natural and the artificial, the serene and the eerie. Exploring paradoxes, the artist situates his images between an ideal paradise and a reality complicated by desires, fears and darker instincts.
A solo exhibition, Simen Johan: Until the Kingdom Comes, was organized by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville and traveled to the 21c Museum in Louisville, KY, and the Pollock Gallery at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Mr. Johan's work is held in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum; Cleveland Museum of Art; Museet for Fotokunst, Brandts, Denmark; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Denver Art Museum, among others. Mr. Johan received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2009. He was born in Norway in 1973, raised in Sweden, and lives and works in New York City. His exhibition of this series is currently on view at the gallery.
Doug Rickard's series, A New American Picture, depicts anonymous inner-city and suburban streets across the United States. In the tradition of street photographers such as Walker Evans and Stephen Shore, but using modern technology, the images reflect the urban and rural decay of overlooked communities in contemporary life. The artist explores locations via Google Street View, the online archive of panoramic photographs that visually map America's streetscape. He carefully selects images and photographs the computer screen, complete with blurred faces and signage that characterize the source images and emphasize the anonymity and desolation of the subjects.
Doug Rickard is currently featured in the New Photography 2011 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photographs from A New American Picture have been exhibited at Le Bal in Paris, the 2011 Les Rencontres d'Arles, and are currently on view at Pier 24 in San Francisco. A limited edition monograph of A New American Picture was published by White Press/Schaden and was named a best book of 2010 by Photo-Eye Magazine and at this year's Kassels Photobook Festival. The trade edition of the publication is planned for release in 2012. Doug Rickard was born in 1968 in San Jose, California, received his BA in U.S. History and Sociology at UC San Diego, and currently lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Matthew Brandt photographs lakes and reservoirs around the western United States, and then submerges each resulting C-print in water collected from the subject of the photograph. Prints are soaked for days or weeks or even months, and this process impacts the layers of color that comprise the image. In the Lakes and Reservoirs series, the photographic subject meets its image, literally. The series considers the current condition not only of our lakes and reservoirs, but also of traditional color photography.
Matthew Brandt's work is included in the collections of the Armand Hammer Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Mr. Brandt was born in California in 1982, received his BFA from Cooper Union in New York, and his MFA from UCLA. The artist currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Pieter Hugo's new series Permanent Error depicts a technological wasteland in Ghana. On the outskirts of a slum known as Agbogbloshie lie piles of discarded computers and electronic parts, many of which were donated by the UN in their effort to close the digital divide. Amid the toxic scene, Mr. Hugo takes portraits of young people who make their living by burning down the plastics of old wires, disks and monitors to extract the metals inside.
The photographs challenge our notions of time and progress by depicting a futuristic, post-apocalyptic world, while also recalling traditional pastoral landscapes. They reveal the effects of technological consumption and the fragility of information once stored in these now obsolete computers.
The gallery will also present work from the artist's series The Hyena and Other Men, which was created while traveling in Nigeria with a troupe of animal charmers and their collection of tenuously domesticated hyenas, monkeys and snakes. The portraits feature groupings of men and animals surrounded by the barren urban centers of northern Nigeria. Taken during quiet moments between the spectacles of street performances, the photographs depict a stillness that subverts the tense physicality of the animals and their trainers.
Pieter Hugo's work is now on view at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, and was recently on view at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia. A mid-career retrospective exhibition will open in February 2012 at The Hague Museum of Photography, The Netherlands, and will travel through 2014. His work is held in the permanent collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Musée de l'Elysée, Lausanne; Huis Marseille, Amsterdam; and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, among others. The artist's books, The Hyena & Other Men (2007), Nollywood (2009) and Permanent Error (2011) were published by Prestel. Pieter Hugo was born in South Africa in 1976 and currently lives and works near Cape Town.
Sze Tsung Leong's series History Images (2002-05) captures the dramatic urban changes that have transformed cities in China, revealing a process that ranges from the destruction of traditional neighborhoods to the mass construction of new urban environments. The large-scale photographs portray an urban reality caught between the end of one history and the beginning of another.
Mr. Leong's work is currently on view at the Museum of Design Zurich and was recently on view at the Princeton University Art Museum. A major exhibition of 156 photographs from the Horizons series was presented at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Mexico, in 2010. The artist's work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, among others. In 2006, his book History Images was published by Steidl, who will also publish Horizons in spring 2012. Sze Tsung Leong was born in Mexico City in 1970 and spent his childhood in Mexico, the United Kingdom and the United States. Mr. Leong is currently based in New York.
Alison Rossiter's photographs are created without a camera on expired, vintage photo paper. The artist collects and experiments with gelatin silver papers that date from the early 1900s through the 1970s, making controlled marks by pouring or pooling photographic developer directly onto the surface of the paper. Abstract forms emerge, and these often resemble landscapes or tornadoes; other shapes are paired by the artist to create minimalist diptychs or assembled into formalist collages. The gallery will also feature recently released photograms from her American flag series.
Alison Rossiter has exhibited her work at venues such as the National Gallery of Canada and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Ms. Rossiter's photographs are in the collections of major public institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Philadelphia Museum of Art; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Columbus Museum of Art; Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. The artist was born in 1953 in Jackson, Mississippi, and currently lives and works in the New York metropolitan area.
Andrew Bush's series, Vector Portraits, are photographs taken while driving the city streets and freeways of Los Angeles. Either stopped in traffic or while traveling at speeds up to 70 miles per hour, the artist takes portraits of other drivers and their cars using a medium-format roll-film camera and flash attached to the passenger side door of his car. In a city famous for its car culture, the series addresses personal privacy and challenges our definition of public space.
Andrew Bush's series Vector Portraits was on view this summer at the Museum Tinguely in Basel. In 2008, Yale University Press published the book Drive, which includes an interview of the artist by Jeff L. Rosenheim, a curator of photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The artist's work is held in the collections of institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mr. Bush was born in 1956 in St. Louis and currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
