Hanart TZ Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new photographs by Lois Conner. Her images in “Life in a Box” were first inspired by the man-made landscape of New York and one office in particular. Conner became absorbed by what she calls “the interstitial space, the zone where the vertiginous mountains of the external world collide and merge with an internal landscape.” Her meticulous and elegant panoramic black and white photographs often depict this zone with interior and exterior office windows, creating a complex relationship between the two landscapes. The effect is at once hallucinatory and precise. A quarter of the world’s working population spends at least eight hours a day in fabricated places like these, hovering, suspended, with sometimes only a secondary reflected image of their city wafting through the mazes of glass. To pursue the project, Conner traveled in the United States, Europe and Asia. She gained access to the offices of some of the world’s leading corporations and law firms, including Adidas, AIG, Boeing, Coca-Cola, Debevoise & Plimpton, Hines, McDonald’s, and Paul Weiss. Some of her most striking images were made in Hong Kong. The result is photographs that describe both the highly artificial character and the existential realities of the way we work today.
Lois Conner is well-known for working with a large-format panoramic camera. Her black and white photographs are made in natural light with long exposures ranging from 3 to 30 minutes. The offices are either devoid of people or the figures are small and moving slightly, while the details of the interior spaces are registered with a haunting clarity. She has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. The subject of more than 50 one-person exhibitions, her work has been shown at museums internationally and is included in the collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian Institution, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the British Library and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. This is her fourth exhibition with Hanart TZ Gallery.