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Reception: Thursday, November 11,
6 - 8 pm
Senior & Shopmaker Gallery is pleased to
announce William Wegman and Fay:
Polaroids 1987-1995. The exhibition, opening
on the 25th anniversary of Fay Ray’s birth,
features more than eighteen polaroids
documenting the remarkable artistic
collaboration between the artist and his fourlegged
muse. All of the photographs were
selected from the artist’s archives and have
never before been exhibited.
In 1979, Wegman, who had been working in video and small-scale black-and-white conceptual
photography, accepted an invitation from Polaroid to work with their new 20 x 24 format camera.
Designed to produce life-sized portraits of amazing clarity and detail within an instant, the large
camera offered spontaneity, scale, rich color, and the possibility of creating serial images, thereby
engaging Wegman and his dogs from Man Ray, Fay Ray, and her progeny
for the next three decades until the company’s financial demise in 2009. Polaroid’s restricted
production of film material coincided with the artist’s gradual move towards digital photography
which began in 2002.
The format of the Polaroid camera forced Wegman to think in terms of its vertical frame, a
compositional challenge he met by elevating Fay on pedestals and furniture, draped in cloth, or
wearing gowns and costumes. These shots developed into a number of hybrid human/animal
characters reflecting the widespread impulse in these years toward narrative portraiture, as seen also
in the work of Cindy Sherman and Laurie Simmons. Present in the polaroids as well as in his
paintings, drawings, and text-based work, is Wegman’s postmodern preoccupation with the work of
other artists: Arcimboldo, Picasso, Donald Judd, and Eadweard Muybridge, to name a few. Perched
on wood cubes, decked with fake fruit, or seen in profile like a Renaissance Florentine dowager, Fay,
as animate raw material, provided a foil and inspiration for Wegman’s daring and hilarious
subversions. William Wegman’s photographs, videotapes, paintings, and drawings have been exhibited in
museums and galleries internationally. Numerous traveling retrospectives of Wegman's work have
been organized over the past three decades, among them Wegman's World, which opened at the
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis in 1981, and William Wegman: Paintings, Drawings, Photographs,
Videotapes, which opened at the Kunstmuseum, Lucerne in 1990 traveling to venues across Europe
and the United States including the Pompidou Center, Paris and the Whitney Museum of American
Art, New York. In 2006, the Addison Gallery of American Art,
Andover, Massachusetts organized Funney/Strange, a comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s work
that traveled to the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York; the Smithsonian American Art
Museum, Washington, DC, the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida, and the Wexner
Center, Columbus, Ohio.
Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday, 10am-6pm, and Saturday, 11am-6pm.
For further
information, please contact Jamisen Ogg gallery@seniorandshopmaker.com
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