FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
BUCKET RIDER GALLERY begins the spring season with new photographs by Greg Stimac in Gallery One and new paintings by Anna Bjerger in Gallery Two.
Chicago, IL, March 23, 2007 – Bucket Rider welcomes the spring season with an exhibition of new photographs by Greg Stimac entitled Mowing the Lawn. Running concurrently in our second gallery is Portrait of a Man, a series of new paintings by Anna Bjerger. The show opens Friday, March 23rd with an artist’s reception from 6 to 9 pm, and continues through April 28th.
Chicago-based photographer Greg Stimac exhibits his latest body of work, Mowing the Lawn in Gallery One. Born in Ohio, Stimac received his BFA from Columbia College. He has traveled throughout the country to document the complex beauty of humanity; investigating the ways we organize and validate our lives, from moments of intense, involved crisis to those of daily routine. With Mowing the Lawn, Stimac has taken the very practical yet mundane (and uniquely American) practice of cutting the grass as the constant to examine the variety of ways we react to the world at large. Our desire to remain in control and keep our residence kempt reveals much about who we are. In these images, he has captured expressions of frustration, detachment, contentment and meditation. He has catalogued a thorough gamut of human emotions and their manifestations, describing the multitude of ways that we operate as beings in the world.
Stimac’s artistic practice is rooted in the American road trip. He travels the country, capturing images for several ongoing projects simultaneously. His project is firmly tethered to the history of American photography, extending the ideas in Robert Frank’s The Americans while referencing the formal seriality of Ed Ruscha’s L.A. photographs of the sixties. At a time when visual information, in the form of television and film, is iterated
ad infinitum and ultimately emptied out, Stimac builds a larger essay by documenting and editing his visual environment, giving us a richer understanding of ourselves.
Concurrently, in Gallery Two, we present new paintings by Swedish artist Anna Bjerger. Bjerger received her MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art and has had solo exhibitions at Max Wigram Gallery in London and the Lithuanian Artist Association. Her critically acclaimed exhibition, Angels in Your Beer, traveled to London and throughout Wales in 2003-4. She is included in Painting People, a brand-new survey of figure painting’s renaissance in the contemporary art world, published by Thames and Hudson. Bjerger paints from books, photographic snapshots and found material, and her paintings are inhabited by recognizable images, full of memory and the traces of lived experiences. The final product becomes something like a remainder, both anonymous and accessible, but also wholly outside of the place where it started.
In her new project with Bucket Rider, she has created 12 portraits of one fictional character, revealing the way the viewed image can erase and deceive. Portrait of a Man is one portrait split into twelve different gazes, in an attempt to reconcile the boundary between fiction and the image. Bjerger employs her singular techniques with paint and brushwork and varies the scale to clarify her position as interpreter, creating works that are at once firmly ‘realistic’ while still obviously rendered.
Please contact the gallery for further information. Also, please note our new location at 835 W. Washington Blvd., 2nd Floor.