Justine Kurland: This Train is Bound for Glory    Oct 15 - Nov 14, 2009

In this series, photographed over two years of travel, Kurland focuses on the distinct, nomadic subculture of the hobo. Her images of trains, train-hoppers, and the American West allude to a hobo mythology developed in folk songs and literature. Kurland’s method combines a documentary process with romantic idealism, giving her images a naturalism inflected by utopian fantasy.

Kurland’s work draws upon the nineteenth-century landscape tradition of depicting a perfect place. Her photographs are narratives gleaned from America’s dream of itself: a collective identity based on a firm faith in manifest destiny. These images are portals into the not-quite-real, not-quite-fictional realm of the American frontier. Kurland is a longstanding traveler, wanderer, and seeker in her own right, whose itinerant lifestyle intersects with and informs her work.

Justine Kurland was born in 1969 in Warsaw, New York. She received her B.F.A from School of Visual Arts, NY in 1996, and her M.F.A. from Yale University in 1998. Her work has been exhibited extensively at museums and galleries in the U.S. and internationally. Recent museum exhibitions have included “Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West” at the Museum of Modern Art, NY; and “Role Models: Feminine Identity in Contemporary American Photography” at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. She was the focus of a solo exhibition at CEPA in Buffalo, NY, in 2009. Her work is in the public collections of institutions including the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, and the ICP, all in New York; the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC; and the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal. She is represented by Mitchell- Innes & Nash.