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BOB CAREY AND GAIL THACKER PORTRAITS MARCH 6 - APRIL 12, 2003 Artists's Reception Thursday, March 6, 2003 6 - 8 pm The June Bateman Fine Art is pleased to announce its second annual Portrait show, an exhibition of experimental portraits by Bob Carey and Gail Thacker. The exhibition opens on March 6 and will run through April 12, 2003. An artist's reception, to which the public is invited, will take place on March 6 between 6 and 8 P.M. Although portraiture is among the most traditional and conservative of artistic genres, in recent years artists have increasingly experimented with ways of representing both themselves and others that push the form's expressiveness while expanding its exploration of the nature of the social and personal self. The work of Bob Carey and Gail Thacker expands the notion of portraiture and in doing so expands our ability to see, think about, and confront the nature of the person, the body, and of photography itself. Bob Carey uses his own body as a medium of exploration. Working in an area that stands astride performance art and photography, Carey typically shaves his entire body, paints it silver, then carefully arranges its photography while decorated or placed in unusual, and often extreme positions. A skilled and successful commercial photographer as well as a photographic artist, Carey uses his photographic skills to make large and exquisite prints of these explorations, forcing the viewer to confront not only the shapes the body can make but his or her own relationship to the physical presence of the bodies. Gail Thacker's explorations of the self manipulate not only the physical self but the photographic material used in representing it. Thacker, like the traditional portraitist, is obsessed with the particular and is particularly intrigued by photography's objective relationship with its subject matter. But that is only the beginning for her. Once the image is made, Thacker's use of positive/negative black and white Polaroid materials printed on colored papers allows her room for extensive manipulation and experimentation, yielding layered, luminous multi textured works. While Carey's studio photographs suggest a concern for carefully controlled personal experimentation with the photographed self, Thacker's work is much more improvisational, with her methods allowing immediate responses to the surface of the photographic material, which consists both of posed and spontaneous depictions of people and objects. Gail Thacker is a member of the "Boston School" of photographers, a group which included Nan Goldin, Jack Pierson and Mark Morrisroe. This small community of artists often photographed each other and friends, with most of its members moving to New York around 1980. A number of Thacker's enlarged Polaroid portraits in the exhibition depict film maker and performance artist Rafael Sanchez. Thacker met Sanchez at Mark Morrisroe's apartment, where a series of photo sessions led to her involvement in Sanchez' super 8 film, "Little Prayers" and a ten year collaboration between the artists. Bob Carey lives in Arizona and studied photography at Arizona State University. His work has been exhibited at the Arizona State University Art Museum, Tucson Museum of Art, The Center for Photography in Woodstock, Holter Museum of Art, and in numerous galleries and museums in the United States and Europe. Gail Thacker studied photography at Tufts University, The School of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MIT, SUNY Purchase, and at the ICP. Her work has been exhibited in numerous galleries, including MIT, Exit Art, and the June Bateman Fine Art, and has been published in The New York Times, Night Magazine, Provincetown Art Museum, and other publications. Among the public collections that include her work are The City University of New York, The New York Public Library, The Polaroid Collection, and Tufts University. Back to Past Exhibitions |
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June Bateman Fine Art |
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