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Lights: Photographs
Solo Exhibition by Grant Davidson
This is Grant Davidson’s first solo exhibition at the gallery which features his most recent collection entitled “Lights”, images of and about artificial sources of light, opening a captivating window into the most utterly basic elements of photography.
Davidson explains: “In this body of work, I exploit the mechanical advantages of photography to investigate ethereal environments often obscured by extreme radiance. Here artificial lights inscribe themselves on film as both light source and subject, unifying the act of exposure with the object observed.” Often working with traditional, antiquated equipment, Davidson displays an archaic fidelity not often seen in contemporary photography, wherein the recent past becomes a means to examine the present.
Grant Davidson completed his BFA in 2006 at the University of the South and his M.F.A. in Photography at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2008. He has exhibited at The Lab in San Francisco, the Creative Center for Photography in Hollywood, California and at the Nabit Art Center, in Tennessee. |
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Seza Bali, Dean Dempsey, Nadim Sabella, and Judy Wu
In its second annual exhibition showcasing contemporary photographic practices in the West Coast, Togonon Gallery presents Approximating Truth, Counterpoint 2010. A catalog accompanies the show.
The four artists in the exhibition, Seza Bali, Dean Dempsey, Nadim Sabella and Judy Wu explore notions of truth in photography by employing a variety of devices, including technical interventions and contrived manipulations to blur distinctions between fiction and truth.
To reshape the question of what’s real, Bali combines traditional photography and digital technology while Dempsey stages situations that have never occurred using theatricality and physical alterations. Further, Judy Wu handcrafts porcelain figures to create characters to depict unconventional stories and characters. Finally, Sabella combines model-making and photography to fabricate cinematic dreamscapes that explore perceptions of memory and renewal.
All four are Bay Area transplants who found inspiration in the West Coast
with their contemporary explorations of the traditionalphotographic themes of landscape and portraiture. Seza Bali’s “Highway 1 Overlook” depicts a panoramic section of California’s Pacific Coast Highway, gloriously sunlit turf and surf, but digitally altered—made symmetrical (though the axis of symmetry is off-center)—so that it becomes an archipelago, or a gigantic cetacean. Dean Dempsey’s “Leftover” depicts a domestic scene turned surrealist, as a woman, headless and equipped with only one arm and one leg, spills her morning tea, the cup bearing the familiar umbrella-toting Morton’s Salt girl walking in the rain. Nadim Sabella’s “In a Fog IV” depicts Mario Botta’s iconic San Francisco Museum of Modern Art building, with its layer-cake brick stripes, enveloped in fog—a real-world view of the fog dome souvenirs sold in the gift shop. Judy Wu’s “The New Majority III” explores American demographics, depicting eight young members of the emerging multiracial tossed salad that seem to have been modeled in clay or modeling compound, colorfully dressed and painted, and then re-photographed against white backgrounds, in an array; they thus combine the conventions of Richard Avedon’s portraiture and Bernd and Hilla Becher’s studies of unconscious visual culture.
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