All Hot and Bothered
Photographs from the
Center for Photography at Woodstock
June 27 – September 28
Howard Greenberg Family Gallery
This exhibition, featuring photographs related to the summer season, explores connections between privacy and expressivity, two typically distinct states of mind that often intersect in the summer. These thirty-five photographs were selected from over one thousand three hundred works in the permanent collection of the Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW), which is on extended loan to the SDMA through a collection-sharing partnership established in 1995.
One starting point for this exhibition was the desire to investigate through pictures the emotional and physical intensities of the summer months; another consideration was our interest in what felt like the guilty pleasure of putting together a seasonal show of attractive photographs. To our surprise and pleasure, the varied intensities we found in the works that we selected have strong connections across the gallery walls as well as to a range of current social and art issues.
Summer’s intensity arises, in part, from the season’s emphasis on self-conscious exposure and frankly camera-aware posing—postures found (on both sides of the camera) in the first group of images to the right of this introductory panel.
Continuing in a clockwise direction, to the right of the opening into another gallery is a group of photographs that, in different ways, capture the heat thrown off by the effort of negotiating physical obstacles and formal constraints. Working against photography’s general tendency to reveal, the photographs here—abstractions and obstructions—work because they refuse to give everything up to the viewer.
On the next wall are photographs that depict physical or psychological agitation of one kind or another: landscapes tortured by heat from above or below, and venues for and scenes of pleasure marked by actual or feigned tensions that hint at the heat and disturbances of summer.
Finally, the photographs on the long wall reveal private moments, intimate encounters, and personal realizations: the group of works depicting single, paired, absent, and linked bodies suggests summer’s languorous suspension of time and the drama of the season’s individual moments, and the group of works featuring visual and textual statements of identity embodies the power unleashed in declarations of self made, heatedly, with joy, anger, pride, or bravado.
Co-curators Ariel Shanberg, CPW executive director, and Brian Wallace, SDMA curator
The Dorsky Foundation, Inc., and the Friends of the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art provide ongoing support for museum exhibitions and activities.
|
Paul Anthony
Because we have Ended as Lovers, 2000
Gelatin silver print
CPW2008.001
Larry Fink
Dance, n.d.
Gelatin silver print
CPW1995.057
Vagner Whitehead
Brazilian for Rent, 2006
Digital print
CPW2008.006
Randy Green
Untitled, n.d.
Dye transfer print
CPW1995.090
|
