|
Yancey Richardson Gallery is pleased to
present Detroit, the gallery!s fifth solo show by
New York-based photographer Andrew Moore.
The exhibition, the result of seven trips made
to Detroit over the past two years, continues
Moore!s use of architecture as a way to
explore themes of history, culture and time. As
the artist states: “ My interests have always
laid at the busy intersections of history,
particularly at those locations where multiple
tangents of time overlap and tangle… Detroit is
more than a story of physical decline, decay
and transformation; it is a city where the
distortion of time is inventing new symbols for
the America of the future.” Moore!s Detroit
series will be the subject of a traveling solo exhibition in 2010, originating at the
Akron Art Museum and accompanied by a monograph Detroit: Disassembled
with an essay by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and Detroit native Philip Levine.
Several of the gallery exhibition!s photographs are characterized by a hint of
Surrealism, with things jarringly out of place or come alive. The ruined
ornamental architecture of a former movie palace, the UA Theater, suggests the
fantastic labyrinthine structures of Piranesi, an early influence on the Surrealists.
In a photograph of what was once Henry Ford!s elegant executive offices at the
Model T headquarters, a carpeted floor ripples with an incongruous landscape of
brilliant green moss. In an abandoned burned school Moore photographed a
melted clock whose face bears the inscription National Time. The photograph
serves as an ironic comment on the country!s economic debacle while referring
directly to the melting clock in Salvador Dali!s painting The Persistence of
Memory. As Moore states, “Detroit is more than a story of physical decline,
decay and transformation; it is a city where the distortion of time is inventing new
symbols for the America of the future.”
Moore!s previous projects include colonial and modernist Havana, the wardamaged
buildings of Sarajevo, post-Cold War Russia, the old theaters of New
York!s 42nd Street and the consumer-laden vertical landscape of the new Times
Square. In 2004, Moore received a commission from The Public Art Fund to
photograph Governor!s Island. In 2005 the Queens Museum, the Museum of the
City of New York and Columbia University!s Wallach Art Gallery commissioned a
series of photographs of the public works of Robert Moses which were exhibited
at all three institutions in January 2007 and published in a book by Abrams. In
2006, Moore was the subject of a mid-career retrospective at Dartmouth
54University.
Andrew Moore!s photographs have been acquired by numerous major museums
including, among others, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Canadian
Center for Architecture, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Francisco
Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Modern Art and the International
Center of Photography.
Moore was educated at Princeton University where he is now an adjunct
professor. With the director John Walker, he produced the film How to Draw
a Bunny, a documentary on the artist Ray Johnson which won a Special Jury
Prize at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival. Two monographs, Inside Havana and
Russia have been published by Chronicle Books.
|
return to artnet.com