Willie Doherty

Willie Doherty’s work is rooted in the political and geographical landscape of his native Northern Ireland. It expands out of this context to address universally significant themes of individual and collective subjectivity and responsibility, creating a persistently significant framework within which to think about who we are, and where and how we live.

This exhibition brings together a selection of new and existing films and photographs, and includes a new film, Buried, made specially for the exhibition. The new film was made and is shown in the context of Ghost Story, first shown at the Venice Biennale in 2007. Both films deal with memory, its repression and return, but while Ghost Story is narrated by a male voice piecing together a story of remembered horror, Buried relies on ambient sound to animate its dark, almost gothic, woodland imagery. The films influence each other, the recounted memories, dreams and premonitions of Ghost Story seeping into Buried.

Also in the exhibition is Re-Run (2002), a double-screen projection showing a man on a bridge simultaneously running towards and away from the viewer. The film was shot on the Craigavon Bridge over the River Foyle, which literally and symbolically divides the Catholic and Protestant communities in Derry. It is shown together with a new series of photographs taken in Belfast, in which recently made images are joined by several taken in 1988 but never shown. The artist’s return to his own history has a resonance with the imagery of remembering and forgetting that motivates Ghost Story and Buried and much of his work.

Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh | Contemporary Art in Edinburgh in The Fruitmarket Gallery

Margherita Morgantin

MARGHERITA MORGANTIN

25 aprile - 23 maggio 2009

Inaugurazione
Venerdì 24 aprile - h 18.00

In collaborazione con Galleria Continua, San Gimignano - Beijing – Le Moulin

Margherita Morgantin Sono diversi i mezzi espressivi a cui ricorre l’artista, originaria di Venezia e che vive e lavora a Milano: dalla performance al video (per cui è nota internazionalmente), dal disegno alla fotografia e all’installazione.
La sua ricerca parte dall’osservazione e dalla descrizione di cose o situazioni concrete, per aprirle ad una condizione ulteriore. Osservare e immaginare diventano due momenti che nel suo lavoro convivono senza soluzioni di continuità: così come nei suoi video il disegno può comparire sovrapposto al filmato sottolineandone la valenza metaforica, o in uno stato di reciproca dissolvenza e trasformazione.
Contatto e convivenza, osservare e immaginare, ma ad occhi aperti, è questo intervallo ciò che anima il lavoro della Morgantin. La nota fortemente individuale del suo lavoro in realtà contiene un invito ad attivare in noi stessi quella capacità immaginativa che da una situazione apparentemente senza via d’uscita, da una condizione di possibile naufragio, lascia affiorare ciò che ci permetterà di riemergere.
A questo sembra far cenno un ultimo lavoro dell’artista, presentato per la prima volta alla Galleria Contemporaneo, basato sull’utilizzo di un oggetto comune, ma indispensabile in caso di naufragio, quale è il salvagente. Ma non si tratta dell’unico elemento tratto dall’insieme delle cose comuni. Anche il materiale catarifrangente normalmente utilizzato a scopo di sicurezza può trasformarsi, senza nulla perdere della sua concretezza, in una nuova icona (come avviene nella grande immagine che costituisce appunto “Catarifrangente”); così come le rilevazioni termografiche utilizzate per osservare gli effetti del vento al suolo, si prestano ad essere lette come un accenno ad altri fenomeni di turbolenza.
È difficile non cogliere come una ricerca, quale quella proposta da Margherita Morgantin, diventi di fatto una riflessione ad ampio spettro che riguarda questo nostro tempo.

Margherita Morgantin è nata a Venezia nel 1971, si è laureata in Architettura, dipartimento di Fisica Tecnica, all'Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia, vive e lavora a Milano, Venezia, Palermo. Ha partecipato a mostre personali e collettive in Italia e all’estero.

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Rear Projection

John Waters
Rear Projection
April 3 – May 2, 2009
Opening reception Thursday, April 2, 2009, 6 – 8 pm

A concurrent exhibition of Rear Projection will be on view at Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles, April 11 – May 23, 2009.

Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to announce John Waters's new exhibition of thirty-six photographs and four sculptures, entitled Rear Projection.

"Rear Projection" is also a movie term for the process in which a foreground action is combined with a background action filmed earlier to give the impression the actors are in the location for the background scene when they are, in fact, filmed inside a studio. In John Waters's latest works, this artificial and outdated visual effect is embraced, attacked and taken to extremes.

Glorifying the struggle, the humiliation and the wild excitement of a life in show business, Waters uses an insider's bag of film tricks and trade lingo to celebrate the excess of the movie industry. Rewriting and redirecting existing film imagery snapped off the TV screen, these one time classic, respected, even honored movies are now assaulted, elevated, subtitled and startlingly altered into a new kind of equality; a cult film that only needs one viewer – John Waters himself. Child stars are given bad habits, innocent movies are perverted by editing out just a few frames, even traditionally beautiful movie stars are glamorously deformed by suspiciously over-budgeted charity advertising campaigns. The cult of religion and the religion of cult are the same in Waters's world. He sneaks into other movies like a spy to photograph the very details their original directors didn't notice. Waters revels in the terrible frustration of today's film business combined with the hostility outsiders feel towards the contemporary art world and hopes, with this new work, to bring into focus a fresh breed of humor, cheap (but satisfying) sexual thrills, and a shabbily elevated artistic appreciation that must always start from the rear of the line.

Waters's first artwork Divine in Ecstasy (1992) immortalized the peak of his favorite muse's rapture. This was followed by many other equally "perfect moments" from his own movies. Since then, he has transposed some of his most provocative themes and motifs concerning race, sex, gender, consumerism, and religion into photographs, montages, and, more recently, sculpture. Editing them from their original context, Waters recombines film stills into "little movies", as he calls his particular form of narrative sequence. Word and image play permeate his work, such as Ham, a photograph of a large glazed ham that he imagines hanging on the wall of a game thespian or casting agent; Catholic Sin is an illustration from his own childhood catechism book that equated the purity of the soul with fresh milk. Two oversized sculptures – Rush, a gigantic "popper" bottle and its spilled contents, and La Mer, a huge jar of the costly face cream Crème de la Mer, both of which Waters admits to using -- poke fun at the exaggerated promise and mythic status of recreational drugs and beauty products.

John Waters lives and works in Baltimore. Recent solo exhibitions include Artistically Incorrect: The Photographs and Sculpture of John Waters at the Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis, MO, 2008. Waters is currently in the exhibition REGIFT at the Swiss Institute, New York, February 18 – April 4, 2009, curated by John Miller, and will be included in the exhibitions Practice, Practice, Practice, Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin, TX, curated by Jay Sanders and Mike Smith, May 2 – June 13, 2009; and The Making of Art, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt Germany, May 28 – August 30, 2009.

Marianne Boesky Gallery - JOHN WATERS - Press Release