15 Nov 2007 to 22 Dec 2007
Opening Reception:
Thursday, November 15th from 6-8 pm
BELLWETHER
134 Tenth Avenue
(between 18th and 19th Streets)
NY 10011
New York, NY
New York
North America
p: +1 212-929-5959
m:
f:
w: www.bellwethergallery.com
Please join us for JANSSON STEGNER’S opening at Bellwether on Thursday, November 15th from 6-8 pm. The exhibition will be on view from November 15th-December 22nd, 2007.
Tenderness and the visual trappings of our social indicators of power are combined in Jansson Stegner’s oil paintings of police officers. In these portraits, the artist veers away from the familiar depictions of cops as big burly strikebreakers or sadists in mirrored sunglasses. Instead, they are primarily women of arresting beauty, whose quiet and contemplative nature challenges the idea that authority must assert itself in violent and oppressive ways.
With languid bodies bent into sculptural forms and limbs portrayed with Mannerist exaggeration, Stegner depicts a physical and emotional awkwardness in his subjects that draws the viewer into their psychological space. Similarly, the minimal surroundings in which the figures are placed—whether natural or darkened voids—provide a framework for concentrating attention on his subjects’ introspection. These stark settings and concentration on the emotional and mental state of the central figure draw from Stegner’s interest in Spanish painters such as El Greco, Zurbarán, and Goya as well as the expressive portraits of Otto Dix and Christian Schad. Stegner’s cops have been displaced from the urban environment and relocated into private, contemplative worlds that are pastoral, monastic and removed.
This is Jansson Stegner’s first solo exhibition at Bellwether and his second in New York. Stegner has been included in group exhibitions in Berlin, Copenhagen, and Munich and his work will be included in The Saatchi Gallery’s forthcoming exhibition, “The Triumph of Painting: Unreal”. Stegner was awarded a 2006 Fellowship from the New York Foundation from the Arts.
Project Room: MELANIE WILLHIDE, The Belt of Venus
In The Belt of Venus, her newest series, Melanie Willhide taps the bliss and blindness of early love.
The lovely pink arch after which the series is named appears in the sky for mere minutes, at sunrise and sunset. It is separated from the horizon by a darker layer, the Earth’s shadow. This band of light becomes apt metaphor for the separation from, and passage through, the images of past loves.
In keeping with her most recent working method, Willhide fabricates both front and backsides of images and carefully imitates the look of wear by hand. To beautify and delay de-composition, the marks of demise are covered with 14K gold leaf.
This new addition to the project creates an iridescent veil, which, along with the hand made opaque backsides, prevents the images from being fully legible. In this way the images resemble the atmosphere of Venus, whose fleeting color frees admirers to speculate about conditions that are not explicitly apparent. There is bliss in the individual blindness Willhide imagines. Her bliss allows us access to our own pasts, to accept the indefinable and the lost as magic.
Ultimately The Belt of Venus shares its comfortable definition of death: as sleep, as a dream, as a reunion with lost loves.
