Bruno David Gallery: Friday, 3 October 2008
Opening Reception: Friday, October 3, from 6 to 9 pm
Main Gallery I WILLIAM GRIFFIN: Recent Paintings
Project Room I PATRICIA OLYNYK: Probe
Front Room I MARGARET ADAMS: Recent Paintings
New Media Room I JESSICA ROGEN: Let Me Entertain You
OCTOBER 3 – 25, 2008
Bruno David Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by William Griffin in the main gallery. William Griffin’s most recent work blends the traditions of Old Masters with 21st century sensibility. He paints human figures as forms and shapes, touching and reacting in sensual gestures. By using the figure’s power to express strong physical and emotional content, and by reducing the informational material, Griffin abstracts his images – much as a photographer or filmmaker crops and frames observed phenomena and concepts. The stylish, large-scale oil paintings he creates are within the long tradition of Western painting and are influenced by the early 20th century artists’ movement away from representational work, yet they are by no means retroactive. A fully illustrated catalog accompanies this exhibition.
In the Project Room, Patricia Olynyk is presenting an exhibition of photographs created during a recent residency as a Francis Wood Fellow at the College Physicians—Mütter Museum in Philadelphia. Her work continues to investigate the often-tenuous relationships between human culture, science and nature, and frequently calls upon viewers to expand their awareness of the worlds they inhabit — whether those worlds are their own bodies or the spaces that surround them. In her latest series, entitled “Probe,” she utilizes a vast inventory of bizarre prosthetic devices and medical instruments collected for their historical value in order to comment on the human desire to fetishize and even anthropomorphize objects used to supplement or probe the human body. Through her photographs, Olynyk draws together both the historical and modern
desire to control and manipulate our corporeal selves.
In the Front Room, Margaret Adams is showing her recent work in an exhibition titled “Blindness”. Her recent work has been inspired by the novel Blindness by Jose Saramago. In his novel, Saramago imagined a world gradually overwhelmed by a plague of white blindness, which was used as a metaphor for not seeing, for not being aware of one’s self and one’s surroundings, psychologically or philosophically. Through contemplation and questioning of their blindness, Saramago’s characters ultimately understand themselves in ways previously unknown, and it is this new insight that precedes the gradual return of some kind of normal vision. At the end of the novel, one of the characters concludes, “I don’t think we did go blind, I think
we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not.” (Saramago 326). The simultaneity of seeing and not seeing and the dynamic movement between these two states of being is a mystery underlying the human condition.
In the New Media Room, video artist Jessica Rogen presents a short video. Let Me Entertain You began with the idea of a reverse striptease. A partially clothed woman is proffered for the viewer's pleasure; her body language beckons invitingly as she slowly, sensuously begins to button up her shirt. The contradiction between the reality and the style of her actions
taunts and criticizes the viewer, while the inherent humor of her playful tease and the ridiculousness of the result helps to cut its bite. By denying access to her body, the woman repossesses herself and refuses to be made into an object. She piles clothing on in excess, mocking the gaze that would undress her while acknowledging the tradition of the naked woman as object in both art history and pornography.
GALLERY HOURS: Wed –Sat 10:00 – 5:00pm
Main Gallery I WILLIAM GRIFFIN: Recent Paintings
Project Room I PATRICIA OLYNYK: Probe
Front Room I MARGARET ADAMS: Recent Paintings
New Media Room I JESSICA ROGEN: Let Me Entertain You
OCTOBER 3 – 25, 2008
Bruno David Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by William Griffin in the main gallery. William Griffin’s most recent work blends the traditions of Old Masters with 21st century sensibility. He paints human figures as forms and shapes, touching and reacting in sensual gestures. By using the figure’s power to express strong physical and emotional content, and by reducing the informational material, Griffin abstracts his images – much as a photographer or filmmaker crops and frames observed phenomena and concepts. The stylish, large-scale oil paintings he creates are within the long tradition of Western painting and are influenced by the early 20th century artists’ movement away from representational work, yet they are by no means retroactive. A fully illustrated catalog accompanies this exhibition.
In the Project Room, Patricia Olynyk is presenting an exhibition of photographs created during a recent residency as a Francis Wood Fellow at the College Physicians—Mütter Museum in Philadelphia. Her work continues to investigate the often-tenuous relationships between human culture, science and nature, and frequently calls upon viewers to expand their awareness of the worlds they inhabit — whether those worlds are their own bodies or the spaces that surround them. In her latest series, entitled “Probe,” she utilizes a vast inventory of bizarre prosthetic devices and medical instruments collected for their historical value in order to comment on the human desire to fetishize and even anthropomorphize objects used to supplement or probe the human body. Through her photographs, Olynyk draws together both the historical and modern
desire to control and manipulate our corporeal selves.
In the Front Room, Margaret Adams is showing her recent work in an exhibition titled “Blindness”. Her recent work has been inspired by the novel Blindness by Jose Saramago. In his novel, Saramago imagined a world gradually overwhelmed by a plague of white blindness, which was used as a metaphor for not seeing, for not being aware of one’s self and one’s surroundings, psychologically or philosophically. Through contemplation and questioning of their blindness, Saramago’s characters ultimately understand themselves in ways previously unknown, and it is this new insight that precedes the gradual return of some kind of normal vision. At the end of the novel, one of the characters concludes, “I don’t think we did go blind, I think
we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not.” (Saramago 326). The simultaneity of seeing and not seeing and the dynamic movement between these two states of being is a mystery underlying the human condition.
In the New Media Room, video artist Jessica Rogen presents a short video. Let Me Entertain You began with the idea of a reverse striptease. A partially clothed woman is proffered for the viewer's pleasure; her body language beckons invitingly as she slowly, sensuously begins to button up her shirt. The contradiction between the reality and the style of her actions
taunts and criticizes the viewer, while the inherent humor of her playful tease and the ridiculousness of the result helps to cut its bite. By denying access to her body, the woman repossesses herself and refuses to be made into an object. She piles clothing on in excess, mocking the gaze that would undress her while acknowledging the tradition of the naked woman as object in both art history and pornography.
GALLERY HOURS: Wed –Sat 10:00 – 5:00pm
BRUNO DAVID GALLERY
3721 WASHINGTON BOULEVARD
SAINT LOUIS MO 63108
314.531.3030
INFO@BRUNODAVIDGALLERY.COM
WWW.BRUNODAVIDGALLERY.COM
3721 WASHINGTON BOULEVARD
SAINT LOUIS MO 63108
314.531.3030
INFO@BRUNODAVIDGALLERY.COM
WWW.BRUNODAVIDGALLERY.COM
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