FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The New Photograph

September 8 – October 22, 2011                                                          

ATLANTA, September 6, 2011 – Hagedorn Foundation Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of works that mirror the ever-increasing centrality of electronic data to all aspects of contemporary life and its interface with photography. The six international artists included in this exhibition appropriate and reconfigure information and images from the incoherent jumble of screen shots that confront us daily on Google Maps, Flickr, Ebay and consumer catalogs, much like their predecessors used nature and street life as resources to present us with the “decisive moment.”

In this exhibition, photography retains its definition of making ordinary moments extraordinary, but instead of finding those “decisive moments” in observed clips of everyday life in a current time world, they are arrived at as preconceived concepts in the studio using images from time frames and locations that may be very remote. In their multifaceted approaches, there is an emphasis on process and emotional expression that harks back to the Photo Secessionists and a search for the new that aligns with the Modernists and Surrealists.
These six artists develop computer programs, organize select amounts of visual information from vast onslaughts of data, manipulate images and materials and disregard genres of art to generate new forms of abstraction and meaning. The resulting porousness between art, pop culture, and publicly available data leaves us with questions about real vs. constructed materials and again addresses the validity of the age old question: What is photography’s relationship to an indexical, experiential reality?

CHRISTOPH ENGEL

Engel creates the latest iteration of aerial photography, harking back to Nadar’s works of the 19th c. However, Engel’s imagined lofty images are composed of hundreds of satellite shots from Google Earth, from different times and indeterminate places, which he uses to create seamless “realities”. His transcendent gaze creates an ambivalent overview of diffuse images, reminiscent of Sugimoto’s memory and seascapes.
The large-scale pigment prints being shown are images of formal clarity and deceptive reality from Google Earth and Google’s terrainand weatherapplications.

DANIEL GORDON

Gordon creates dioramas and collages from the flood of cyberspace images. His 3-D scenes contain both paper sculptures he creates from his downloads and flat paper images. He reshoots his pixelated scenes with a 4 x 5 or 8 x 10 view camera and uses the dissonance between the flatness and depth, the pixelation and crispness of the large format lens, to add interest to the piece and emphasize the false seamlessness of the internet and the non-indexical nature of all photography.
His pieces in this exhibition include still lifes, landscapes and one of his “Frankenstein” like portraits. His works are reminiscent of the painters Guston, Dana Schutz, installation artist Red Grooms and Thomas Demand.

BRANDON JUHASZ

Juhasz folds and glues flat pictures of approximate reality garnered from the internet to create strange, realistic - yet fake - narratives. His frequently humorous works plumb our collective consumer psyche and show how our desires are manipulated.
His works in this exhibition concentrate on tropes of mythic, nostalgic and consumer Americana created by our marketing systems.

JONATHAN LEWIS

Lewis creates pop art derived from seductive consumer packaging. His intoxicating colors and abstract patterns result from pixelating photographs of product placement until the rich spectrum of the Iris Printer produces saturated, abstract mirages of desire.
His pieces in this exhibition include his series on big box stores “WalmArt,” and high-end consumer storefronts “Designer Labels.”

JASON SALAVON

Salavon constructs computer software that reformats data into intriguing patterns and ambiguous “averaged” images through digital layering. 
His pieces in this exhibition are appropriated from portraitists of the Dutch Golden Age – Hals, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, and Velázquez – and result in ethereal layered portraits reminiscent of the Impressionists Turner and Monet.

PENELOPE UMBRICO

Umbrico surveys the huge database of Internet culture, excising and recontextualizing the constant flow of images that are popular with our collective consciousness. She amasses related pop and consumer images to create indexes of them, revealing the surreal nature of the image creation and consumerism that surround us.
Her pieces in this exhibition “87 Suns from Flickr – 29 Visible,” “79 Moons from Flickr – 51 Visible,” and the monumental wall sized installation “Suns (from Sunsets from Flickr)” resulted from a Google search of “the most photographed subject:” 541,795 sunsets. Her work recalls the abstraction and ethereal mystery of Klee and Kandinsky.

The September 24th opening is in conjunction with our neighboring gallery, Lumière, and their exhibition of silver gelatin vintage photographs, Politics and the Utopian Dream.