PHILADELPHIA, PA.- Pentimenti Gallery brings you Judy Gelles: Front-Stage / Backstage. This is the artist second solo exhibition with the gallery.
For Judy Gelles, this is a show made of three parts. The first part sees Judy exploring her interest in the brightly colored, family owned, beach huts of Bournemouth, England. The second, her reflection on phrases her parents handed down to her as words of wisdom for becoming an adult. The third installment finds Judy giving an honest account of a life at home, as it really is, not an over-idealized veneer. These ideas converge at the intersection of family, and history.
SUNRISE / SUNSET is a collection of photographs that examine uniformity and variation. The beach huts of Bournemouth, England have been painted in unique tints inspired by the natural colors of the landscape as seen during sunrise and sunset.
They also look at Judy’s interest in mapping how architecture and social organization come together, as it pertains to family dynamics. These old properties have historically been kept in the family for generations. The newly constructed hut sites sold within weeks of launch and tenants commissioned the construction of their quirky new pads from local specialist builders. A stipulation of the site license requires hut owners to maintain the precise color shade of their hut, preserving the design integrity of the whole scheme for decades to come.
WORDS FROM HOME are phrases that have been with Judy for over fifty years. All of us carry the voices of our parents in our heads, they offer advice, criticisms, guidance, and warnings. The family is one of the key agents of socialization in our society, transmitting culture, values, and behavioral models to each generation. In the past, these pieces of text would be used to accompany Judy’s images, now they have a new life, offering a physical presence that her
parents no longer do.
A FEMALE GAZE describes growing up in the 1950’s when white middle-class girls were taught that their main goals in life were to become wives and mothers. For Judy, her actual experiences didn’t fit in with what she had been told. She had to show life as it was. So she tried to capture things as they were. She captured the 5:00 am feedings, toilet training, babysitters, dirty dishes, messy rooms, and messy relationships. She was constantly reminded of the falseness of the American Hallmark card images that we were supposed to maintain at all times. Her hope is to present this record as something that can be appreciated in terms of its own special and not easily defined aesthetic. Here it is, as it was.
Judy Gelles has received her MFA in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design. Gelles has exhibited her work at the Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland; Photo Center NW, Seattle, WA; Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles, CA. She has been awarded the CENTER Award, Second Prize “Curator’s Choice” (2016); First Prize, Prix de la Photgraphie Paris (2013); William Penn Foundation Grant, Philadelphia, PA (2010); the Main Line Art Center, Haverford, PA (2011) and the Fleisher Challenge Artist (2007). Her most recent sponsorship comes from the Lomax Family Foundation Grant (2012). Judy Gelles is also in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, MA; Harvard University Fine Arts Library, Cambridge, MA; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; among many others.
