Page Bond Gallery

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

NOTHING TO BE DONE: RECENT WORK BY CLOVER ARCHER LYLE AND VIEW FIND: A GROUP EXHIBITION OF PHOTOGRAPHY AT THE PAGE BOND GALLERY, FRIDAY, JANUARY 20, 2012

The Page Bond Gallery is pleased to present NOTHING TO BE DONE: a solo exhibition of the recent work of Clover Archer Lyle and VIEW FIND: photographs by regional, national, and international photographers.

NOTHING TO BE DONE, a solo exhibition of the cerebral work of Clover Archer Lyle, will be on view in the West Gallery.  Much of her work emphasizes the arbitrariness and subjectivity of established systems of analysis.  Her “yes let’s go, they do not move” series involves a complex, layered process.  Using a found book that would otherwise have been discarded, she selected 40 pages of text and redacted all of the type except for the letters that spelled out the dialogue from Samuel Beckett’s 1949 play Waiting for Godot.   The resulting shapes (from paragraph indents, blacked-out text, and negative spaces) were then reproduced and studied, creating diagrams for the process for the first 20 pages.  As a final step, she produced clear resin casts of the last 20 pages used.  Lyle demonstrates that, though entirely different, this way of reading and interpreting a book is just as legitimate and no more subjective than conventional modes of analysis.  The resulting objects constitute the work, serving as a record of the lengthy, lovingly detailed process.

Holly Morrison’s photographs, included in VIEW FIND, have the obscure quality of dreams.  They give the viewer a sense of having experienced them before, as if they are impressions lodged in a collective memory.  This new work, developed in collaboration with Nigel Rolfe at The Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró a Mallorca, reflects and intimately engages a specific sense of the place in which it was created.  The saturation of color, inspired by Miró, marks a new aesthetic for her photographs.  As with earlier bodies of work, her compositions are disorienting and strangely familiar.

Gordon Stettinius’s candid photographs often focus on the fascinating underbelly of American existence.  He manages to insert himself uncritically into the exotic, occasionally sordid, scenes of life that are outside the experience of the average person.  His “Notes from U.S. Route 1” is a series of images of the once well-traveled route, which fell out of heavy use with the creation of I-95 in the 1950s.  His images of the aging towns and businesses that once thrived along this byway evoke the work of William Eggleston and showcase a restlessness and appetite for movement that is distinctively American.

William Wylie has visited the ancient quarry of Carrara, Italy, every summer for many years.  While his work includes a body of photographs of cavatori, or quarry workers, most of his compositions exclude the human presence that has shaped the Carrara landscape.  Nonetheless, with their careful lighting and direct, engaging perspective, Wylie’s photographs of industrial machinery and uncut marble blocks read as portraits themselves. His studies of quarried marble and debris invite viewers to consider the texture and subtle beauty of scenes they might otherwise dismiss.  The images of quarry workers are a tribute to the men who aided his project.

Long regarded as one of America’s leading photographers, Emmet Gowin first became known for his black and white images of his wife Edith and his family in Danville, Virginia, in the late 1960s.  His mannered images of daily life are simple yet intensely personal.  He soon began experimenting with a circular lens, embracing the strange perspective and “wonderful exaggeration near the edge” that it provided.  His more recent bodies of work are views, some aerial, of landscapes and terrain around the world that often convey a tension between the magnificence of natural beauty and the visible scars of human activity.

Other national and international photographers participating in VIEW FIND include Michael J.N. Bowles, Kimberly Burgess, Reece Camp Carter, Elijah Gowin, John Grant, Kristi Hager, Thomas Hager, David Halliday, Thurston Howes, Laura Letinsky, Fleming Lunsford, Sally Mann, Glen McClure, Hullie Moore, Ansel Olsen, Alyssa Salomon, and Lee Saloutos.

An opening reception for the artists will take place at the Page Bond Gallery on Friday, January 20, 2012 from 7 to 9 pm. The exhibition will remain on view through Saturday, February 25, 2012.

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.