Karel Fonteyne: After Dark

June 18 - September 5

Karel Fonteyne is an isolated case.

We call these artists in the art world Einzelgänger or sometimes Abseitigen.

He is indeed an Abseitige. A lonesome and always searching finder.

He’s not the maker of the ‘nice’ picture—no, time stands still in his work.

The deep secret of what I could almost call random mastery lies in its self-explored loneliness, in the air at the discovering of all the forms of loneliness.

He lives and works in a world that only he inhabits.

He feels safe when he dreams.

It’s a cold world full of dilapidation, they are rooms where he plays on a small stage.

A macabre game with people and things,

full of puzzles and secrets.

He alone holds the key to the lock of alienation and contemporary anxiety.

His world is not an underworld but an in-between world, where life and death static live together on the border of the non-existence.

In Karel’s work a reality is created in the reality, a kind of infrarealism, a screaming silence enveloped by invisible glass, a fragility without violence, a dream which content you have already long forgotten.

He photographs the life you’ve already left. The things that are no longer visible.

His work testifies of a surreptitious towing beauty.

― Paul Snoek – Poet & Painter, 1976

“What I was chasing in circles must have been the tail of the darkness inside me.”

―Haruki Murakami, After the Quake

“A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness,”

― Jean Genet

“One need not be a chamber to be haunted.”

― Emily Dickinson,The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“How terrible this darkness was, how bewildering, and yet mysteriously beautiful!”

― Stefan Zweig,The Burning Secret and other stories

“We must bring

our own light

to the

darkness.”

― Charles Bukowski

“POZZO:

I am blind.

(Silence.)

ESTRAGON:

Perhaps he can see into the future.”

― Samuel Beckett,Waiting for Godot

“I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.”

― F. Scott Fitzgerald,The Great Gatsby

“Even so, there were times I saw freshness and beauty. I could smell the air, and I really loved rock ‘n’ roll. Tears were warm, and girls were beautiful, like dreams. I liked movie theaters, the darkness and intimacy, and I liked the deep, sad summer nights.”

― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

“The real world is in a much darker and deeper place than this, and most of it is occupied by jellyfish and things. We just happen to forget all that. Don’t you agree? Two-thirds of earth’s surface is ocean, and all we can see with the naked eye is the surface: the skin.”

― Haruki Murakami,The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Bruno V. Roels: Sensory Memory

June 25 - October 31

Bruno V. Roels’ new edition for Gallery FIFTY ONE is called ‘Sensory Memory’.

The title refers to the memory process that allows individuals to retain impressions of sensory information after the original stimulus has ceased. The title is also a nod to the way the prints were made: the photographic paper was moved during exposure in the dark room, so instead of a photograph of one palm tree, the image becomes a multiple of that same image.

All prints in the edition are different and some have been touched with ink. This edition fits perfectly in Roels’ oeuvre: it touches on the nature of the analogue photographic process, playing with repetition and variation, while using his favorite imagery: palm trees.

Richard Avedon, Rena Bass Forman, Brassaï, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Robert Capa, Horst P. Horst, Nadav Kander, André Kertész, O. Winston Link, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Abelardo Morell, Ron Van Dongen.: Black & White: Photographs from the Julie Riegel and Suzette Clerou Collection

January 30 - August 29

Black and white photography, also known as ‘monochrome’ photography, originated during the mid-nineteenth century and has pervaded to this day. A technology-based practice, photographers explore and exploit the levels of abstraction conveyed by reducing a scene to value and shape amidst advances within the field. Paralleled interest is blatant in aficionados, appreciators, and collectors who continue to be mesmerized by monochromatic imagery used to depict a multitude of genres and subjects. Black & White typifies the convergences of the photographer’s exploration and a collector’s passion.

Julie Riegel and Suzette Clerou have been collecting black and white photography since the 1970s. The twenty-five piece collection is an outstanding representation of significant photographic works created over the last 100 years.

Press Release

Alison Wright: Grit and Grace, Women at Work

March 14 - October 12

From India to Africa, tea fields to technology, women are the resilient hard-working backbones of their communities. These 30 images by photographer Alison Wright, a National Geographic Traveler of the Year, showcase the magnetic stories of remarkable women living in post-conflict or hard-to-reach areas in developing countries whose perseverance is often overlooked.

Wright’s vivid portraits illuminate a shared determination among women in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East to create better futures through creativity, ingenuity, and drive. They celebrate the individuals and grassroots organizations committed to finding creative solutions to the challenges these women face, because empowering women benefits not only the individuals and their families, but their villages, their nations, and our world.

— Katherine Gass Stowe, Curator

This project is presented in partnership with The Vermont Women’s Fund.

Color Shift

August 31, 2019 - July 12, 2020

Photography has had a tumultuous relationship with color since its invention. Early photographers employed colorists to tint images with surrogacy for the missing color; inconsistent color sensitivity affected the way objects were depicted even in monochromes. Fleeting and erratic color dyes shifted C-prints in a matter of decades, or even years. Color Shift draws from the California Museum of Photography’s extensive collection to explore the many ways in which we encounter color in photography, from the added to the actual.

Image: Olindo Ceccarini, Joan Crawford holding color control bar, 1930, digital composite from tri-color separation negatives, collection of the California Museum of Photography, gift of Olindo O. Ceccarini.

Noah Berger: Facing Fire

February 22 - August 9

Fire as omen and elemental force, as metaphor and searing personal experience – these are the subjects explored by the artists of Facing Fire. California’s diverse ecologies are fire-prone, fire-adapted, even fire-exploded in scale and severity. There is a powerful consensus that we have entered a new era. The artists of Facing Fire bring us incendiary work from active fire lines and psychic burn zones. They face fire, sift its aftermath, and struggle with the implications.

Image: Noah Berger, Photographer Justin Sullivan shooting low during the Camp Fire, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

Gordon Parks: A Loaded Camera: Gordon Parks

May 13 - August 23

Charles "Teenie" Harris: In Sharp Focus: Charles “Teenie” Harris

January 25, 2020 - May 1, 2022

CMOA is thrilled to announce the creation of a dedicated gallery for the Teenie Harris Archive. This space will feature iconic examples of Harris’s photographs and host a number of educational programs and community events inspired by this world-renowned collection.

Harris—who was a photographer for The Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation’s most influential black newspapers—created an unparalleled chronicle of African American history and culture during the mid-twentieth century. As both a member and documentarian of the black community, Harris remains an iconic figure in Pittsburgh to this day. With this installation, the museum celebrates Harris’s legacy and looks forward to creating opportunities for creative collaboration with local partners. The installation opens January 25, 2020, and will be ongoing.

The Teenie Harris Gallery is organized by Dominique Luster, archivist, and Charlene Foggie-Barneett, archive specialist, Teenie Harris Archive.

An-My Lê: An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain

March 14 - July 26

An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain is the first comprehensive survey of the politically charged work of photographer An-My Lê (American, born Vietnam, 1960). Featuring nearly 125 photographs, this exhibition finds connections across Lê’s career and provides insight into her evocative images that draw on a landscape tradition to address the complexity of war.

This expansive exhibition explores the intricacies of armed combat through the work of a photographer who lived through the Vietnam War. Through Lê’s lens, viewers are exposed to military training, maneuvers, and reenactments, and are invited to question their own relationship to, and complicity in, conflict.

An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain also presents new photographs from Lê’s ongoing series Silent General. These previously unexhibited works grapple with the legacy of America’s Civil War and connect to the complexities of our current socio-political moment. Taking inspiration from Walt Whitman’s autobiographical Specimen Days, the photographs probe the ways in which past conflicts influence and shape the present landscape.

While Lê is represented in many major museum collections, An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain is the first ever survey of her work in an American museum. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue featuring many never-before-published images.

An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain is organized by Dan Leers, curator of photography at Carnegie Museum of Art.

Lori Van Houten: Natural Worlds

June 10 - July 26

Lori Van Houten will present a new series of multi-panel photographic works, entitled Raptors and Songbirds, which is inspired by the long tradition of storytelling as a means of understanding human experience. She explores the concept of fairytales and how they use the divine or supernatural to teach valuable life lessons to young women in particular. Romantic images constructed into triptychs form visual narratives that shed light on the way these tales are told; graceful swans, dimly lit chandeliers, or the delicate folds of a silk dress seduce the audience while symbolic details of flora and fauna act as cautionary messengers. The compositions are made with photographs shot with modified Polaroid cameras, allowing the artist to record motion, alter color, and provide a slightly skewed vision. This fragmented juxtaposition of dream-like images implies a story that is told over time. Van Houten explains “my goal is not to tell a complete tale but to suggest phrases of sentences overheard in passing.”

Van Houten added a three-dimensional aspect to the photographic triptychs with a series of unglazed porcelain crowns, intended for the young women listening to or featured in the fictional narratives. The delicate porcelain crowns, made with textiles and other mixed materials, are preserved in glass domes, further alluding to their fantastical aura. Van Houten’s BA is from Syracuse University and MFA from Southern Illinois University. She has exhibited extensively throughout the US and Europe.

Press Release

Kate Breakey: Kate Breakey: Avian

June 20 - September 6

Catherine Couturier Gallery is delighted to present Avian, an exhibition of new work by gallery artist Kate Breakey.

The exhibition features new work from Kate Breakey’s series of 42 bird nests printed on silk and embroidered. In Safe in the Studio, Breakey shares her interest in bird nests: “Perhaps it is because they are mysterious, secret spaces that allow you to have a personal connection with a wild bird and I crave that relationship with nature”. Each piece, like the nests they are inspired by, is unique, delicate, and beautiful.

The exhibition also features Breakey’s new hand colored pigment prints of birds inspired by scientific drawings from 18^th and 19^th century natural history encyclopedias and smaller, more intimate quail eggs.

Since 1980 Breakey’s work has appeared in more than 110 one-person exhibitions and in over 60 group exhibitions. A native of South Australia, Kate moved to Austin, Texas in 1988. She completed a Master of Fine Art degree at the University of Texas in 1991 where she also taught photography in the Department of Art and Art History until 1997. Her collections include the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, The Australian National Gallery and the San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts, as well as various private collections. She has resided in the Tucson, Arizona for 20 years. She regularly teaches workshops nationally and internationally.

Unlike previous exhibitions, there will be no public reception, and private viewings must be booked in advance. Please email us at gallery@catherinecouturier.com to reserve a time to visit the exhibition.

Press Release

S.B. Walker: Nor’East

June 27 - October 12

“Who was it said that you never get to a place until a day after you come, nor leave it until a day after you go?”  —Sarah Orne Jewett

Since early 2014, photographer S.B. Walker has traveled more than 100,000 miles throughout Maine in an attempt to render a truly nuanced visual record of contemporary American life. On the face of it, a project such as this appears to be a rational, census-like undertaking akin to the vast photographic surveys conducted in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. In reality though, it is a windy road dictated by intuition, serendipity, and strange happenings.

Walker says, “Over the course of the project I’ve had the privilege to spend time with 10th generation Mainers, aging back-to-the-landers, young farmers, recent immigrants, artists, ex-convicts, entrepreneurs, drag queens, affluent summer folk, fishermen, crypto-currency traders, and so on. Despite the richness of these encounters, I am left with more questions than answers. To define a time and place is in some sense an impossible task—though for the artist, trying to articulate what cannot be described is perhaps the best kind of sport. I do my best to keep this in mind when the vagueness of my mission weighs heavy on my thoughts.”

Walker’s Nor’east is one artist’s attempt to craft an epic poem about Maine. The story is laid out in a series of unsentimental photographic vignettes, revealing the state’s identity in the context of globalism, with all its glories and contradictions.

S.B. (Sam) Walker, b. 1987, lives and works in Portland, Maine. His works have been exhibited internationally and can be found in public and private collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Fitchburg Art Museum; Smith College Museum of Art; David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University; Houston Museum of Fine Arts; Peabody Essex Museum; The Thoreau Institute; and Paul Sack Photographic Trust.

His projects have been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Smithsonian Magazine, Photo District News, Lens Culture, Hyperallergic, and Aperture, among other publications.

In 2017, Walker released his first published monograph Walden, which features an afterword by Yale scholar Alan Trachtenberg. Works from his series examining the Polaroid Corporation are featured in the international traveling museum exhibition, The Polaroid Project, Art and Technology. Janet Borden Inc., New York, NY, currently represents his work.

S.B. Walker | Nor’east is funded in part by a Bicentennial Project Grant from the Maine Arts Commission, an independent state agency supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Press Release