Elizabeth Conn-Hollyn: Borders/Boundaries: Kashmir

May 19 - June 9

321 Gallery presents a dual-projection of Borders/Boundaries: Kashmir, the second iteration of Elizabeth Conn-Hollyn’s ongoing “Borders/Boundaries” project. This is Conn-Hollyn’s first solo show in New York City.

Over the past decade, Conn-Hollyn’s work has focused on both the literal and abstract concept of borders. Among her various projects, she has photographed “Welcome To…” signs between state lines; attempted to take studio portraits of everyone she knows in order to analyze her social network; operated a drone to create introspective videos of its own flight paths; and used Google Earth to create fly-over investigations of the border between the US and Mexico. Making work that is objective in appearance, Conn-Hollyn uses a variety of media to create typologies addressing the powers that control the shifting landscape we inhabit, and the issues arising from the bureaucratic representations of borders. Her focus lies with what is misrepresented and who is not pictured. In Borders/Boundaries: Kashmir (2018), Conn-Hollyn presents two video projections, Zoom Toggle Don’t Blink and Line of Control Border Tour, two works that explore the Kashmir region through publicly available satellite maps and imagery of the contested military control line between the Indian and Pakistani controlled zones of the territory. She has created soundtracks to accompany the videos.

Elizabeth Conn-Hollyn (b. 1987, Santa Monica, CA) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. She uses video, photography, cartography and drawing to examine the hegemonic depictions of geopolitical border regions and networks. Recent projects directly related to her practice include “Research Reventón” (Tijuana, MX & Los Angeles, CA) and “Everybody I Know” at The Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, CA). Recent exhibitions include Border/Boundaries: US at the New Wight Gallery (UCLA, Los Angeles, CA) and Hello Earth at Loom Gallery (Brooklyn, NY). She is a recipient of the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts Grant, multiple travel and research grants from UCLA, and was a fellow at The Artist Project of Los Angeles. Conn-Hollyn graduated with a BA in photography from Bard College and received an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Ben Depp: Bayou’s End

April 5 - September 30

Bayou’s End, A Gallery for Fine Photography’s exhibition of photographs by Ben Depp, captures the rapidly changing landscape of Southern Louisiana from the birds-eye perspective of a motor-powered paraglider piloted by the artist himself. The incredible risk required to make these photographs is not always apparent in the images themselves; Depp must navigate changing wind conditions and avoid obstacles while not dropping his camera or being dropped himself, often while flying mere feet above the water’s surface. Depp’s photographs function as both documentary and fine art, contributing meaningfully to the ongoing dialogue on Louisiana’s wetland loss while simultaneously transcending this context.

Gun Country

March 10 - July 31

Issues of gun ownership, culture, and violence continue to divide the United States. Gun Country​ explores representations of firearms in the Addison’s collection in order to examine the historical underpinnings of the country’s gun fascination. On view in the Museum Learning Center, these objects are shown together for the first time and serve as an invitation to a community discussion of the pervasive cultural iconography of the gun in America.

Press Release

Photographers Among Us

April 7 - July 31

​​Drawn from the museum’s collection, Photographers Among Us​ presents a selection of 20th-century documentary works. From Lewis Hine’s photographs of child laborers in 1910 to Danny Lyon’s images of Texas prison inmates in the late 1960s, many of the pictures included exhibit a civic consciousness. Mirrors of their times, produced for newspapers, magazines, photobooks, government-sponsored projects, or the United States Army, photographs in this exhibition have become historical agents, shaping our understanding of the past.​

Jerry Birchfield: Asleep in the Dust

March 24 - September 23

Photography has a weighty history as an art medium and as a tool to record our daily lives. We tend to seek value in what pictures are of rather than in physical photographic objects. The work of Jerry Birchfield examines this tendency to privilege images using photography, sculpture, drawing and text. Jerry Birchfield: Asleep in the Dust highlights the artist’s iterative process through which he creates works of art that blur boundaries between image, object, subject and meaning.

Birchfield applies layers of darkroom processes to achieve untraditional gelatin silver prints. Unlike most printed photographs, Birchfield’s are unique, as each sheet of paper retains traces of physical acts performed in the darkroom. Camera-based film negatives are enlarged onto light-sensitive paper that is partially obstructed by other materials (the technique used to make photograms). Chemicals then develop the latent image and further stretch contrast, tone and texture, sometimes introducing or erasing major compositional elements. In these highly constructed photographs, meaning emerges as much from the process of their production as from the recognizable imagery they contain.

Slivers of visible images reveal dusty, debris-laden surfaces that were in fact created to be photographed. Every aspect of Birchfield’s work emerges from the isolated space of his studio, where scraps, detritus and unfinished works often reappear in new iterations of ideas. In some cases, photographs become sculptures—by encasing prints in plaster, Birchfield masks their images and warps the paper. Viewers are confronted by the space that the photograph and the surrounding plaster occupy, which corresponds to the dimensions of a photograph in a standard frame.

Anchoring the exhibition, a raised platform in the center of the gallery references the importance of the act of framing for Birchfield. Its structure incorporates rectangular horizontal sections that are covered in glass, referencing common picture frames. Like amateur actors, sculptures that appear to mimic everyday objects are assembled on the stage. Some of these sculptures were created for past projects; others were made from fragments of cast-off materials—they have emerged from the dust of Birchfield’s studio.

—Elizabeth M. Carney, Assistant Curator, Akron Art Museum

Jerry Birchfield: Asleep in the Dust is organized by the Akron Art Museum with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Ohio Arts Council.

Diane Arbus: Diane Arbus: A box of ten photographs

April 6, 2018 - January 27, 2019

In late 1969, Diane Arbus began to work on a portfolio. At the time of her death in 1971, she had completed the printing for eight known sets of A box of ten photographs, of a planned edition of fifty, only four of which she sold during her lifetime. Two were purchased by photographer Richard Avedon; another by artist Jasper Johns. A fourth was purchased by Bea Feitler, art director at Harper’s Bazaar, for whom Arbus added an eleventh photograph.

This exhibition traces the history of A box of ten photographs between 1969 and 1973, using the set that Arbus assembled for Feitler, which was acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) in 1986. The story is a crucial one because it was the portfolio that established the foundation for Arbus’s posthumous career, ushering in photography’s acceptance to the realm of “serious” art. After his encounter with Arbus and the portfolio, Philip Leider, then editor in chief of Artforum and a photography skeptic, admitted, “With Diane Arbus, one could find oneself interested in photography or not, but one could no longer. . . deny its status as art. . . . What changed everything was the portfolio itself.”

In May 1971, Arbus was the first photographer to be featured in Artforum, which also showcased her work on its cover. In June 1972, the portfolio was sent to Venice, where Arbus was the first photographer included in a Biennale, at that time the premiere international showcase for contemporary artists. SAAM organized the American contribution to the Biennale that year, thereby playing an important early role in Arbus’s legacy.

The Metropolis in Latin America, 1830–1930

March 22 - June 30

Rania Matar: In Her Image: Photographs by Rania Matar

December 23, 2017 - June 17, 2018

This exhibition brings together four bodies of work by the Lebanese-American photographer Rania Matar that trace the development of female identity through portraiture. Depicting transitional moments of life, from young girlhood to middle age, Matar’s works address personal and collective identity through photographs mining female adolescence and womanhood. Photographing girls and women in both the United States and the Middle East, the artist shows how the forces that shape female identity transcend cultural and geographic boundaries.

Ellen Carey: Ellen Carey: Dings, Pulls, and Shadows

January 20 - July 22

Since the 1990s, experimental photographer Ellen Carey has been making photographs that defy photographic conventions of depicting identifiable subjects. Instead, her works depict vibrant fields of color that are meditations on the very nature of photography as an image created by the action of light on a light-sensitive surface. The exhibition Ellen Carey: Dings, Pulls, and Shadows features seven key works that explore the artist’s interest in color, light, and the photographic process as the subject of her practice.

Jan Staller: CYCLE and SAVED

February 24 - August 19

These two short videos by New York photographer-videographer Jan Staller reflect on a potent contradiction of contemporary material life. Where CYCLE revels in the powerful abstracting of paper traveling at high speed down a conveyer belt on its first step to being recycled, SAVED is a playful celebration of hundreds of small tools and toys accumulated over the years by the artist. Together these videos ask us to reflect on what we choose to keep and what we throw away.

Guillermo Cervera: Flow

April 4 - May 31

Not An Ostrich: And Other Images from America’s Library

April 21 - September 9

Press Release