February 20 - March 27, 2010

 

Jason Horowitz's provocative large-scale and extreme close-up photographs of expressive drag queens conjure a multitude of reactions. Horowitz continues his ongoing interest in exploring the intersection of landscape and portraiture and how hyper-realism morphs into abstraction. Shot with the same "glamour" lighting set-up used for fashion images, these photographs subvert that process to look at what is real rather than ideal.

 

In the new body of work entitled DRAG, a new psychological element enters the artist's earlier explorations of faces and bodies. The theatrical artifice of the make-up, similar to a mask, is at once concealing and revealing. We find ourselves shocked, drawn in, immersed, fascinated, yet a bit squeamish. Horowitz masterfully plays with the tension between attraction and repulsion. The over-the-top vamping and exhibitionist joy of drag queens is tempered by a simultaneous sadness and introspection. By exploding scale, Horowitz reveals not only the fascinating visual terrain of the face but also challenges our own hidden biases about femininity and masculinity, beauty and ugliness, gay culture, race, sexuality, and aging.

 

Horowitz initiated this series by shooting Washington DC's acclaimed drag queen, Shi-Queeta Lee. Word spread quickly among her friends, so Horowitz was able to photograph many of the city's finest performers over the past two years. Most recently, two of his drag queen photographs were selected by internationally known collector Mera Rubell of The Rubell Collection for the Washington Project for the Art's "Cream" exhibition that opens Saturday, January 30 at the Katzen Art Center. Two monumentally-scaled drag queens are included in "Transhuman Conditions," an important exhibition curated by Jeffry Cudlin that runs through April 3, at The Arlington Arts Center.

 

This is the second solo exhibition of Jason Horowitz's work at Curator's Office. Horowitz has exhibited his work at the Katzen Art Center, Washington, DC; The Visual Art Center of New Jersey, Summit, NJ; Peer Gallery, New York, NY; The Siber Gallery, Goucher College, Baltimore, MD; The Arts Center of the Capital Region, Troy, NY; NEXT Chicago Art Fair; Civilian Art Projects, Washington, DC; Blue Sky Art Center, Portland, OR; The Light Factory, Charlotte, NC; Aqua Art Miami Fair, Miami Beach, FL; The Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Pittsburgh, PA; Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Germany; McLean Project for the Arts, McLean, VA; the Ellipse Art Center, Arlington, VA; Longwood Center for the Visual Arts, Georgetown University Art Gallery, Washington, DC; School 33, Baltimore, MD; Washington Project for the Arts, Washington, DC; and the Arlington Arts Center, Arlington, VA. His work is in the collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. He was the winner of the 2007 Aaron Siskind Award in Photography.

 

 

 

 

27 February to 3 April 2010

 

Artists Pauline Boudry (1972) and Renate Lorenz (1963) often draw inspiration from archives of historical (portrait) photography and historical films. An important focus in their work is the history of sex and gender discourses and practices, as well as the meaning of 'visibility' since early modernity.

The 2009 work Salomania, consisting of an installation with HD film, documentation and palm trees reconstructs the dance of the seven veils from Alla Nazimova's Salom. Artist, performer and gender activist Wu Ingrid Tsang (1982), and choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer (1934) are the performers in the film. The original movie from 1923 was directed by Charles Bryant, and was a film adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play with the same name. The silent movie was produced by openly gay actrice Alla Nazimova who also starred in it, whilst being Bryants (beard)wife at the time. The script follows the Biblical story of the Jewish princess Salome, who in Christian traditions is depicted as an icon of dangerous female seductiveness. King Herod desires his youthful stepdaughter Salome, while she in turn is more interested in the missionary Jokanaan (the Baptist), who rejects her. She therefore gives in to Herods desire to see her dance, but demands the head of Jokanaan on a platter as her reward. She kisses the severed head when it is brought to her.

 

At the beginning of the 20th century there was a wave of excitement surrounding the character of Salome, which would later be referred to as Salomania. This popularity was instigated by a play about this biblical character written by Oscar Wilde in 1894. Women got together and imitated the exotic and liberating dance of the seven veils. Several dancers became famous for their specific interpretations of Salome. The figure stood for entrepreneurial independence and sexual freedom and therefore became an icon of sodomite subjectivity. The installation Salomania takes up motifs from the silent movie, such as gazes, the active desire of Salome, and the figure of the veil, but also elements of Art Deco, which the movie celebrates in the costumes and the backdrops, like palm trees made out of ostrich feathers. Images of farness and of the technological can be seen as part of colonial politics, at the same time they seem to have been transformed by the film Salom. Here they are established as images that make space for female or transvestic fantasies and desires. A space between the genders and between Orient and Occident appeared to be possible. A documentation on different performers of the dance of Salome at the turn of the 20th century proposes a sort of archaeology in the history of queer performance and modern dance.

 

Also shown and rehearsed in the video by Boudry and Lorenz are sections from Valdas Solo, which the choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer created in 1972 after having seen Nazimovas film. The installation takes up Salome as a transgender figure and the motif of a queer appropriation of the exotic.

 

Project Gallery: Sharon Core

 

February 27 - April 10, 2010

 

The Yancey Richardson Gallery is pleased to present Harmony Sisters, an installation of new work by Finnish artist Esko Männikkö.  Winner of the prestigious Deutsche Borse Prize in 2008, Männikkö has exhibited internationally since representing Finland at the 1995 Venice Biennale.

 

An ongoing series begun in 2005, Harmony Sisters is comprised of intimate photographic portraits of domestic and wild animals, including horses, cows, dogs, monkeys, and birds, taken near the artist's home in northern Finland or in zoos in Europe.  Building upon an earlier series, Flora and Fauna, Harmony Sisters testifies to Männikkö's deep and respectful relationship with nature and his subjects. Tightly composed and closely cropped, Männikkö's highly detailed renderings of swirling fur, fleshy tongues, wrinkled muzzles and glistening eyes approach beauty while bordering on the grotesque.  In certain images the animal subjects return the unflinching scrutiny of Männikkö's camera and the gaze of the viewer with an equally steady and powerfully engaging eye.  As described by Julia Bryan-Wilson in Artforum (Nov. 2006), "These engrossing - and gross - details resist the romantic conventions of anthropomorphism: Each eye is singular, impassive, and intensely focused, a metaphor for Männikkö's camera and its sharp, monocular gaze."

 

Filled edge-to-edge with strong, formal compositions in deeply saturated color pressed close to the picture plane, the photographs take on the character of a painting.  This quality is underscored by the large wooden frames made by Männikkö, which both complement his images and comment ironically on photography's relationship to painting.

Recognized as "Young Artist of the Year" in Finland in 1995, Männikkö first gained international prominence with his portraits of isolated Finnish bachelors in the "Far North" who epitomized a kind of loneliness and self-reliance.  In 1996, he was awarded an ArtPace international artist residency in San Antonio, Texas, where he photographed the residents of two small Mexican American communities on the border of South Texas.  His ongoing series, Organized Freedom, focuses on abandoned houses resulting from rural depopulation throughout northern Finland.

 

Works by Esko Männikkö are held in the collections of major museums including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Foundation Cartier, the Moderna Museet and the Malmo Art Museum, among others. He has been the subject of mid-career retrospectives at the Kursaal Art Museum, San Sebastian, Spain and Millesgården Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden.  Männikkö has published three books including The Female Pike, which was selected for two compendiums of the most important books in the history of photography.

 

The gallery and artist are grateful for the support of the Consulate General of Finland.

 

 

YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY
535 West 22nd Street 3rd floor
New York, NY 10011
+1 646-230-9610