April 11 – May 18, 2013
Artists’ reception:
Thursday, April 11th, 2013
6:00 to 8:00 p.m.
ClampArt is very pleased to announce “Joshua Lutz: Hesitating Beauty,” the artist’s second solo show at the gallery. The exhibition coincides with the release of Lutz’s monograph of the same title from Schilt Publishing (Hardcover, 96 pages, 9.5 x 6.7 inches, $35).
In “Hesitating Beauty,” Lutz breaks down the structure of the photograph as truth and challenges the traditional function of the medium in building narrative. The project is an intimate portrait of the artist’s mother unlike any other photographic model.
Blending family archives, interviews, and letters with his own photographic images, Lutz spins a seamless and strangely factual (yet unflinchingly fabricated) experience of a life and family consumed by mental illness. Rather than showing us what it looks like, “Hesitating Beauty” plays with our conceptions of reality to show us what it feels like to grapple with a family member’s retreat from lucidity.
Joshua Lutz writes: “Holding on so tightly to what I believed was sanity and being consumed by fear of depression and schizophrenia prevented me from being fully present to my mother’s reality. The past few years, as she slipped away from the aggressive paranoia and depression of my youth to an almost calming sense of delusion, made it much easier for me to rid the anger that veiled my life and to attempt to find a place of empathy and compassion as I managed her care. In making this work and simultaneously falling deeper into her psychosis, I tried to imagine a time when the past, present and future collided; a place where the weight of memory is heavier than reality.”
Joshua Lutz graduated with an MFA in photography from Bard College/The International Center for Photography in 2005. He has received several prestigious awards and grants, including being named one of the top thirty emerging photographers by Photo District News Magazine in 2004 and winning The Tierney Fellowship in 2007. Lutz has exhibited his work in numerous group shows and solo exhibitions over the past fifteen years.