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Andrew Rafacz
Keith Couser
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BUCKET RIDER GALLERY continues the fall season with In the Forest, a new photographic installation by Sarah Anne Johnson, in the main exhibition space and Salt of the Earth, a new series of paintings and works on paper by James Everett Stanley in our project room.
Chicago, IL, October 20, 2006 – Bucket Rider continues the fall season with an exhibition of new photographs and an installation by Canadian-born artist Sarah Anne Johnson. Running concurrently, in our project room is Salt of the Earth, a new series of watercolors on paper and several oil paintings by James Everett Stanley. The show opens Friday, October 20th with an artist’s reception from 6 to 9pm, and continues through November 22nd.
Sarah Anne Johnson continues her exploration of the themes of idealism and nature and humanity’s ongoing struggle with the natural world in her first stateside solo show since 2005.
The main installation of In the Forest is a room of large lenticular panels of spruce trees photographed at the night. The term lenticular refers to a printed image that shows depth or motion as the viewer’s angle changes. Thus, the effect is as if the ubiquitous trees are swaying in the night’s breeze. This installation is accompanied by a new series of single photographs which continue her work from her Tree Planting project in 2005. With this project she combined traditional photographs of the landscape and the people involved in it with photographs of sculptural dioramas (formed from the craft product Sculpee) that recorded her memories of her lived experience. The juxtaposition of the lived or instantiated and the remembered adds another dimension to the distance from the natural world that we as human beings draw out by the simple fact of our presence in it..
Ms. Johnson was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada in 1976. She completed her MFA at Yale in 2004, where she is currently teaching. Her thesis project, Tree Planting, was exhibited at Julie Saul Gallery in New York in 2005 where it garnered great critical success. It subsequently traveled to Duke University and the Platform Gallery in Winnipeg. She also recently exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Winnipeg. Her photographs are in the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery, Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, KS, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
In our project room, running concurrently with In the Forest, we present Salt of the Earth, new work by James Everett Stanley. Coming off a very successful show at Freight and Volume in New York which opened last month, we exhibit a series of very intimate, delicate watercolor portraits and several canvases that continue to develop his contemporary themes of isolation and quotidian revolution, the mythopoeic and the paramilitary. Upon first viewing of Stanley’s work, there is a sense of the future and the past colliding. At once, the images listen to history and the historical modes of painting. And yet, often very sublimely, the tremble of apocalypse seems to loom near, in the settings and eyes of his subjects. The people that populate Stanley’s narrative are absolutely human, as the exhibition’s title suggests, born of the ground on which they so tentatively, but proudly, stand.
Mr. Stanley currently splits his time between New York and San Francisco. He received his MFA at Columbia University in 2005. He was recently included in an exhibition at Frederic Snitzer Gallery in Miami, FL and was last seen at Bucket Rider in Can I Get A Witness?, a group exhibition last December. IN 2005, Stanley was the recipient of a Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Studio Program space and participated in residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Scuplture 2002 and Fine Arts Work Center 2002-2003.