Page Bond Gallery will present The Edge of Space: Photographs by William Wylie and View Find 8: A group exhibition featuring work by Penny Ashford, Mary Ellen Bartley, David Douglas, Jeri Eisenberg, Pam Fox, Elijah Gowin, David Halliday, Cynthia Henebry, Robert Llewellyn, Amanda Means, Wael Sabour, Lee Saloutos, Ginevra Shay, and Jon-Phillip Sheridan. The exhibitions will open Friday, January 18 from 6 to 8PM and wll be on view through February 16, 2019.
In his new exhibition The Edge of Space, artist William Wylie explores the embellishment of space through architecture across a tightly edited selection of photographs spanning the past ten years. Using light to illuminate volume, he transforms buildings from Germany, Italy, and the United States into highly evocative representations of what he calls “spatial practice,” meditations on how people organize and order the place within which they exist and move.
Throughout the history of photography, buildings have been highly valued as photographic subjects. The first photograph, View from the Window at Le Gras by Nicephore Niepce, was also the first architectural photograph. In The Edge of Space, Wylie sharpens that tradition by employing a refined and spatially complex linearity previously seen in his work from the marble quarries of Carrara. His subjects here range from nineteenth century greenhouses and Brutalist apartment buildings to the metal hanger used to hide the Enola Gay bomber, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb, during its training runs in the Utah desert.
William Wylie earned his BFA from Colorado State University and his MFA from the University of Michigan. Early in 2018, he released Pompeii Archive, a book documenting his explorations of Italy’s Pompeii. Pompeii Archive was published by Yale University Press. His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Art, and Yale University Art Museum. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a VMFA Professional Fellowship and the Yale Gallery of Art’s Doran / LeWitt Fellowship in 2012 and 2014. He lives in Charlottesville and is the Director of the Studio Art Department at the University of Virginia.
In this series, Elijah Gowin’s is drawn to the landscapes of self-taught artists. Specifically, he is fascinated with the landscapes that surround them. The exhibit provides an opportunity to see self-taught Birmingham artist Lonnie Holley and his world through Gowin’s caring lens. These photographs were taken during the final days before Holley’s environment was lost to a bulldozer, making way for a new airport nearby.
Holley began making art in the late seventies, carving sculptures from a sandstone‐like material left as a by‐product of the steel industry. His early carvings were simple, but he was soon creating complex sculptures of historical figures and painting.
The mystery and ambiguity Gowin creates in these images is reminiscent of a walk through Lonnie Holley’s yard, yet they are Gowin’s work. Through his selection and his intervention, he has both documented and revealed truths of the special place.
Elijah Gowin received his MFA in Photography from the University of New Mexico. His photographs are in the collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Center for Creative Photography, among others. His awards include the John S. Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008 as well as grants from the Charlotte Street Foundation and the Puffin Foundation. He is currently a professor of art at the University of Missouri in Kansas.
In her new body of photographs, Trace, Pam Fox is interested in still life imagery that combines the fluidity of drawing and painting with the optical specificity and technical control offered by photography. In this series of images, she is photographing backlit glass and other still life items through printed linen. Lit from behind, the still life casts shadows forward onto the linen. These shadows and the objects behind the loosely woven fabric distort and fuse. Cubist-like, the shapes break down as foreground and background merge. The resulting images are ambiguous, yet “straight” and un-manipulated photographs.
In a recent interview, Fox told American Spark podcast, “What intrigues me most about photography is its compelling allusion to physical reality.”
Pam Fox is a Professor of Fine Arts at Hampden-Sydney College. She holds her B.F.A. and M.F.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University in Communications Arts and Photography respectively. She is the recipient of two Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellowship Grants, two Virginia Museum Fellowships, and the Theresa Pollack Prize in Photography. Her work is included in many corporate and museum collections, including the permanent collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
The Page Bond Gallery, located at 1625 West Main Street exhibits contemporary art in a wide variety of media and disciplines including painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture and ceramics. The gallery acts as a venue for the work of emerging and established artists with local, national, and international reputations.