2nd
August – 1st September 2012
Brancolini Grimaldi announces a summer group show
including work by Massimo Vitali, Mitch
Epstein, Dan Holdsworth, Sophy Rickett, Roy Arden, Marie Amar and Peter Fraser.
 |
| Mitch Epstein, Cocoa Beach, FL, 1983 |
Several key works by Mitch Epstein, one of the most
influential photographers working today, are featured in the exhibition. Taken
from Recreation – American Photographs
(1973 – 1988), Cocoa Beach I shows cars and camper vans gather in a crowded
Florida campsite at dawn to witness the launch of the space shuttle. In another
image, tourists in Glacier National Park, Montana, turn their binoculars to the
sky, though the object of their gaze remains a mystery. Flag taken from Family
Business, shows the American flag carelessly folded and wrapped in
polythene, recently returned from the dry cleaners. The series explores the failure of the American dream
through the eyes of Epstein’s father and the sad decline of his business during
the late 1990s.
Roy Arden, most well-known as a photographer, is also
a collector and archivist of images on a grand scale. His archive of images,
which he has collected from newspapers, magazines and the internet, form the
starting point for his small-scale collages which playfully explore themes of
history, modernity and pop culture though fragments of cut and torn images.
 |
| Sophy Rickett, Untitled (Nature Study, 2009 |
Much of Sophy
Rickett’s photographic and video work has explored encounters between
people and nature, and the implicit human desire to connect with or to
experience a sense of the ‘sublime’. The starting point and
inspiration for Untitled (Nature Study)
is a barn owl centre in rural England, which organises various ‘Barn Owl
Experiences’ for people interested in seeing the birds close
up. Rickett was interested in making idealized photographs of the
birds, as natural and haunting as a real encounter in the wild might be. In fact
the images are highly orchestrated, and push the photographic process to the
limits of its technical capabilities. Other nature studies show branches against the sky, in which
Rickett experiments with form, colour and light.
Dan
Holdsworth’s recent work, Transmission New Remote Earth Views, appropriates data from the US Geological Survey to
document the ideologically and politically loaded spaces of the American West
in an entirely new way. In his images of the Grand Canyon, the distinctive
rock formation becomes abstracted through the process of removing vegetation
and other natural aspects of the landscape, so that meaning is made through
what it is absent, as much as what is seen. With neither the schema of the
romantic nor the everyday to guide us, Holdsworth absorbs us into a vision of
the unknown; a space that is unequivocally, transcendentally, Other.
La Poussière by Marie Amar is a series of
images in which she transforms degraded material produced during the process of
drying clothes, into photographic meditations on the nature of colour, time and
the value of waste. Softly floating
abstracts hover on the picture plane, the colours ranging from jewel-like reds
and blues, through to sooty blacks and sculptural greys. The images reflect on the interaction
between man and technology, a beautiful homage to the usually ignored residue
of that interaction.
As
well as photographs from Peter Fraser’s
recent series, A City in the Mind,
the exhibition also includes Small
Robotic Arm CK Airbrush, 1997 taken from Fraser’s iconic Deep Blue series. Inspired by IBM’s attempts to create a computer
capable of beating the Grand Master chess player, Gary Kasparov, Fraser
photographed some of the world’s most scientifically advanced technological
instruments, creating portraits of them as if them were sentient objects.
 |
| Massimo Vitali, Cabo Frio, 2003 |
Also included in the exhibition are several of Massimo Vitali’s iconic beach scenes
from the US and Europe. Seemingly
unaware of Vitali’s gaze, holidaymakers swim in the sea, or try to find space
on the crowded beaches. For Vitali, the beach is a place where the mundane and everyday merges
with natural beauty. The images
reflect a sense of freedom, even hedonism, but with their uniform bleached out
light, there is also a sense of conformity and even banality.
