You Are Here* Central Park Draguerreotypes D.70-D.76
February 21-April 5, 2008
Reception: Thursday, February 21st 6-8 pm Artist talk Saturday, February 23rd, 5:30 pm
Thatcher Projects is pleased to announce You Are Here*, the first solo New York exhibition for Australian artist, Gary Carsley.
Daguerreotypes are a seminal, large-scale photographic technique that uses iodized copperplates and a camera obscura to produce photographic monotypes. They were a radically new medium when they were introduced. "Draguerreotypes" is a term Carsley uses to describe his digital images that are also outputted as photographic monoprints. Carsley begins this body of work by taking photographs of important international parks (for this exhibition, focusing exclusively on Central Park). He schematizes them into layers of dark and light, and from a vast archive of scanned adhesive laminated faux wood grain motifs, he builds a collaged image fragment by fragment. The results are images that look like highly complex pieces of marquetry, but which in reality exist only as digitized faux copies of nature. As for parks, we proceed from the assumption that they are designed and curated representations of nature rather than nature itself, or as it can be called in this context, "dragged" nature.
The Central Park Draguerreotypes D.70 to D.76 were created for the exhibition You Are Here*. The artist has developed a gallery floor plan/map of Central Park as a "guide" to the exhibition, so that, as one walks through the space, the gallery "morphs" into the familiar landscape of stretches of Central Park. The map serves as the intersection between inside and outside, mashing the two into a series of established codes of scales, colors, and lines used in mapping that are established methods from getting you from one place to the other. The map will be available at the exhibition, and features an essay by Rafael von Uslar who has written brilliantly on the artist before and to whom Thatcher Projects owes a debt of gratitude for the insights in this release.
This past year Gary Carsley completed a major 95-panel installation, Paramatta Park, for the Attorney General's Department Building, Sydney, which is short-listed for the Sir John Sullman Prize. The artist exhibits in Amsterdam, Cologne, Sydney and Singapore.
ARTIST TALK Gary Carsley will speak about his current body of work at the gallery on Saturday, February 23rd beginning at 5:30 pm.
UPCOMING Visit Margaret Thatcher Projects at PULSE New York this March 27-30 at its new location of Pier 40 in Tribeca (West Side Highway at West Houston)
Margaret Thatcher Projects is located at 511 West 25th Street, Suite 404 (between 10th and 11th Avenues). Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 11 am to 6 pm.
