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Jill Greenberg | “Studio Visit,” Cool Hunting

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From David Graver’s story on Jill Greenberg’s “Paintings” for Cool Hunting:

On the fifth floor of a joint residential/workspace building in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, photographer Jill Greenberg set up shop back in 1997. While she would leave in 2000 for the West Coast, 12 years later she returned and the studio itself has had a resounding impact on her latest gallery show “Paintings.” We’ve been following Greenberg for years now, but this latest crop of calculated and chaotic works delivers a new dimension to her already stunning array of accomplishments.

The large-scale works are photographs taken of Greenberg’s own experimental paintings atop glass, featuring light reflected in wet paint smears and globs, as well as images cast through stencils. There’s very little post-production and these are not composites—rather, pigment and light are being photographed. “I am trying to comment on the war between painting and photography,” Greenberg shares with CH. “Clearly there is one. Photography continues to be really disrespected, even as a result of there being so many photographers. It becomes more questionable; the value of a photograph and the skills needed to make a photograph. Anyone can take a picture with an SLR and press a ‘Photoshop filter.’ My filter is my brain. It’s me.” And yet, with all the gravity in tow, they’re also very fun pictures.

View the original article

View the exhibition at ClampArt
Browse all of Jill Greenberg’s work at ClampArt

Adam Ekberg solo show in Philadelphia

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Adam Ekberg solo show in Philadelphia
Image: Copyright Adam Ekberg, “Outpost #1,” 2011, Archival pigment print

Adam Ekberg’s work will be featured in a solo exhibition at the Sol Mednick Gallery at The University for the Arts in Philadephia from February 13 – March 13, 2015.

Adam Ekberg’s exhibition “The Life of Small Things” presents photographs depicting actions orchestrated by Ekberg in empty landscapes and domestic settings. Captured with a large-format camera, these scenarios exist in the world, if only for the brief moment that the photograph is made. The images are not manipulated or augmented in post-production; rather, the photographs depict as clearly as possible the artist’s interventions and performances. The objects inhabiting the frame are drawn from everyday life. The aerosol container spews an eternal flame, the milk leaps from the drinking glass, and the airborne pineapple creates a celestial eclipse. Formality and absurdity combine in Ekberg’s images to deliver a dry visual humor.

Paradigm Lecture: February 19, 2015, 1.00 p.m., Connelly Auditorium
Opening Reception: February 19, 2015, 4.00 – 7.00 p.m.

Terra Hall
211 S Broad Street
Philadelphia, PA 19107
http://uarts.edu/events/2015/02/life-small-things-adam-ekberg

Browse all of Adam Ekberg’s work at ClampArt


Blog post by:
Brian Paul Clamp, Director

Janet Delaney | “Photos Document Development, Displacement,” KQED Radio

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From Michael Krasny’s interview for Forum on KQED Radio:

The 1970s and ’80s were an era of dramatic transformation for San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood. A new photo exhibit at the de Young Museum documents the SOMA neighborhood amid the wrenching change of redevelopment and urban renewal. We’ll talk to photographer Janet Delaney about the exhibit, and why those images still resonate today.

Listen to the interview

Browse all of Janet Delaney’s work at ClampArt

Michael Crouser | “Photo Essay: Michael Crouser,” Cowboys & Indians

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From Kirsten Fawcett’s article for Cowboys & Indians:

For his latest long-term project, Crouser shifted his attention to a series of small mountain ranches in rural Colorado, where he has spent the past eight years photographing the cowboys who work the land, run the cattle, and maintain a time-honored Western way of life—even as modernization and urban development threaten to erase their future existence. He calls the series “Mountain Ranch” and plans to eventually compile the images into a monograph.

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See the article in full

Browse all of Michael Crouser’s work at ClampArt

Palmer Davis | “Palmer Davis,” LensCulture

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From LensCulture’s feature on Palmer Davis:

Palmer’s photographic eye was honed over a twenty-five year career as a Madison Avenue Advertising Creative Director. His first photography class at age sixteen was a transformative experience that started him on a lifelong artistic journey. He studied photography at Hampshire College, California College of Arts and Crafts and The International Center of Photography, where he is now a longtime member of the faculty. Widely exhibited and collected, Davis is a fine art photographer who is represented in NYC by ClampArt gallery.

View the original feature

Browse all of Palmer Davis’ work at ClampArt

Janet Delaney | “Distant memories of South of Market,” The Bay Area Reporter

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From Sura Wood’s article for The Bay Area Reporter:

“Janet Delaney: South of Market,” now on show at the de Young Museum, is a photographic essay that documents the city’s brush with redevelopment, gentrification, the wages of progress, and their casualties in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

While not exactly paradise, the lively, diverse neighborhood of South of Market depicted in Delaney’s pictures, which was deemed a slum by opportunistic city officials and developers, was once home to an eclectic mix of artists, gays, small-business proprietors and Filipino families. Today, though, that’s a mirage, a distant memory of an area that bears little relationship to the teeming, more homogeneous, higher-end district that replaced it.

Growing up in her hometown of Compton, CA, Delaney had watched as the tight-knit community she had known since childhood dispersed and departed for the suburbs due to a combination of sleazy real-estate speculation, racism and the panic that followed the riots in the 1960s.

View the original article
Browse all of Janet Delaney’s work at ClampArt

Pacifico Silano | “Resurrecting the Gay History of the Holocaust,” Vice Magazine

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From Emily Colucci’s in-depth article and interview with Pacifico Silano’s for Vice Magazine:

New York–based photographer Pacifico Silano’s stunning and devastating exhibition “Against Nature,” on view at ClampArt until February 14, explores an often overlooked and frequently forgotten period of LGBT history: the persecution—and eventual slaughter—of gay men by Nazi Germany. The title is a reference to Joris-Karl Huysmans’s infamous novel, as well as the phrase in Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code that both rendered homosexuality illegal and equated it with bestiality.

This show mines the same vein as his previous photographic series, “Male Fantasy Icon,” which examined the gay communities decimated by the HIV/AIDS epidemic through the figure of Al Parker, a 1970s gay porn star who died from complications from AIDS. In “Against Nature,” Silano uses archival sources from World War II and the earlier German Naturist movement to not only assert the importance of remembering the gay victims of the Holocaust but also explore the latent homoeroticism inherent in the Nazi’s idealized vision of the Aryan male.

View the original article

View the exhibition at ClampArt
Browse all of Pacifico Silano’s work at ClampArt

Christopher Churchill | “Kiss From a Mall Cop,” The Morning News

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From Emma Winsor Wood’s article for The Morning News, illustrated by an image from Christopher Churchill:

Experts, however, like Katherine Newman, co-author of “Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings,” point to the futility of quick security upgrades. Most threats are internal; bulletproof glass and cameras won’t protect students from a student who walked in with them that morning. Case in point: on January 14, a six-year-old boy carried a loaded gun at school for at least three hours. The boy, a first grader, had mistaken the gun for a toy weapon. As Newman observes, “The only real hope for preventing rampage shootings is to increase the likelihood that kids who are witness to these hints of [possible violence] are able to come forward and tell someone.”

View the original article

View Christopher Churchill’s image “Hudderite Classroom”
Browse all of Christopher Churchill’s work at ClampArt

Adam Ekberg | “Orchestrating the Ordinary,” The Village Voice

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From R. C. Baker’s review for The Village Voice:

Who has strung Christmas lights over that crepuscular creek? What unknown object was dropped into a glass of milk so that a balletic white blob leaps upward? (The technical finesse here is descended from the elaborate high-speed cameras Harold Edgerton invented in the 1940s to capture infinitesimal slices of time, including the ignition of an atomic explosion, and a bullet mid-flight.) In Ekberg’s photos you intuit the production crew just outside the frame, one tossing the pineapple skyward, another pushing the shutter button just as the huge fruit partially blocks the sun (“Eclipse,” 2012). But you also sense many unseen, unsuccessful shots, where we might see only the butt of the pineapple or a couple of stray fronds poking in from the frame edge.

View the original article

View the exhibition
Browse all of Adam Ekberg’s work at ClampArt

Isa Leshko | “Moving monochrome pictures show dignified, elderly animals as they approach death” Daily Mail

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From Kieran Corcoran’s article for dailymail.com:

The eyes of a turkey are not the most obvious place to look for sadness, empathy and pride.

But these moving images show the dignified twilights of farm animals who made it through most of their natural lifespan to reach old age.

The selection of images, showing animals as young as five and as old as 33, were taken taken by photographer Isa Leshko, and often involved spending hours with the animals before they would be comfortable enough with her to pose for the photographs.

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Browse all of Isa Leshko’s work at ClampArt

Jill Greenberg’s “End Times” cited by American Photo

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A color photograph of a female child crying with tears streaming down her cheeks.
Image: Jill Greenberg, “Earth,” 2005, Archival pigment print.

ClampArt is pleased to announce that Jill Greenberg’s “End Times” series made the recent American Photo timeline of what mattered most in photography over the past 25 years.

From American Photo:

For our special 25th anniversary issue, we look at photographs from the past quarter century that changed our lives.

Greenberg’s series “End Times” was a commentary on the politics of the Bush administration. First shown in Los Angeles in 2006, the work incited rage among some viewers and spawned a huge group of aesthetic imitators.

Jill’s next exhibition at ClampArt will open February 19, 2015. This new work promises to be as groundbreaking as previous projects, though it is a noticeable departure from the portraits of humans and animals for which she is best known.

View the series “End Times”
Browse all of Jill Greenberg’s work at ClampArt

Blog post by:
Keavy Handley-Byrne, Gallery Assistant

Gordon Parks (1912-2006)

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Gordon Parks was a world-renowned photographer, writer, composer, and filmmaker known for his humanitarian work on projects with a deep commitment to social justice. Parks was born into poverty in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1912. He bought his first camera at a pawnshop at the age of 25 after admiring photographs of migrant workers in a magazine. He taught himself how to use the camera, and moved to Chicago where he became interested in documenting the poor black neighborhoods of the city’s South Side. He soon won a fellowship which led to a job with the Farm Security Administration in Washington, DC, and this is when he produced some of his most iconic images, including “American Gothic,” which pictures a member of the FSA cleaning crew in front of an American flag.

Once the FSA was disbanded, Parks began shooting for the Office of War Information. He also worked editorially for Vogue and Life as their first African-American photographer.

“Paintings”

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February 19 – March 28, 2015

Opening reception:
Thursday, February 19, 2015
6:00 to 8:00 p.m.

Closing reception:
Saturday, March 28, 2015
5:00 to 7:00 p.m.

ClampArt is very pleased to announce “Jill Greenberg: ‘Paintings,’” the artist’s eighth solo show at the gallery.

Well known for her daring and experimental photographic portraits, Jill Greenberg has returned to drawing and painting with real, physical pigment. Applying and combining a variety of paints—from oil to acrylic to gouache—on a glass support, the artist lights the surface with a combination of artificial and natural light before photographing the abstract compositions by use of a sophisticated digital camera back which allows for maximum detail. While contrast and hue are pushed in the digital capture software, the images themselves are all authentic recordings of the ever-changing light reflected off the paint. Greenberg’s wet and dry pigments fuse creating a dizzying and dynamic field of scrapes and bubbles.

Greenberg purposely took on the medium of painting in response to the appropriation tactics of certain Pictures Generation artists who mine photographic images from mass media, advertising, and the fine arts. These artworks, which have historically been understood to call into question Modernist conceits such as autonomy and originality, have now become so ensnared in the market, they have folded back upon themselves and raise ethical issues concerning fair use and, of course, copyright.

By photographing paintings Greenberg is evoking contemporary criticism concerning medium specificity and what Rosalind Krauss has called “The Post-Medium Condition.” Interested in displacing and disrupting formalist definitions, Greenberg further confounds by thwarting the endless reproducibility of the photographic image and offers her mural-sized pieces as unique, one-of-a-kind art objects.

Jill Greenberg’s work has appeared in numerous prestigious publications such as the New Yorker, Washington Post, Boston Globe, New York Sun, Blink, Harper’s Magazine, Art Ltd Magazine, and French Photo. Her photographs have been exhibited in a great number of gallery and museum exhibitions all around the world, including mid-career retrospectives at the Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona Beach, Florida and Fotografiska in Stockholm, Sweden. Her art is represented in such permanent collections as the Portland Art Museum, Oregon; The Kemper Museum, Kansas City, Missouri; National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; among others.

Janet Delaney | “Lost Side of SF,” KQED Arts

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From Kristin Farr’s article for KQED Arts:

Having documented San Francisco’s ever-evolving communities in the ’70s and ’80s, photographer Janet Delaney offers a retrospective moment for a city presently undergoing yet another sea change in South of Market, a new exhibit at the de Young Museum. Concurrently, illustrator Wendy Macnaughton chronicles local neighborhoods through her “drawn journalism.” Both of these artists create images that will portray the future history of San Francisco, and thus, in a meeting of the minds, we asked Macnaughton the illustrator to ask Delaney the photographer a few questions about the changing face of the city.

View the original article

Browse all of Janet Delaney’s work at ClampArt