PHILADELPHIA, PA.- The Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery of the University of the Arts presents After Now, a group exhibition of six artists, each of them among the most exciting artists working in contemporary Philadelphia. As such, this exhibit can be understood as an extension of the Circa 1995 project in the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery this past fall. The artists in this current iteration are Gideon Barnett, Michael Ciervo, Micah Danges, Samuel Hindolo, Peter Allen Hoffmann and Kelsey Halliday Johnson.
What ties these artists together is both generational and the fact that all derive their sources from mediated images. These Philadelphia artists transcend the first Image Generation that appropriated print technology (Sherman, Prince, Kruger et al.) to gather information trolled from the Internet and more complex relationships involving private semiotic meanings. Some of these artists are painters, some are photographers; some consider their work post studio, dealing rather directly with web and film imagery. Whereas previous Philadelphia generations lived on South Street, in South Philly or in Old City, this younger group is situated widely in the "newer" neighborhoods of Girard, Grey's Ferry or Kensington. The viewer must be aware that this grouping is of a curatorial construct. Still, as will be seen, there are visual connections between these six bricoleurs that are coolly intelligent and sensuous.
These artists are also engaged locally in major curatorial programs, as entrepreneurial gallerists, and as studio assistants, and all carve out the time to devote to their craft in ways that are cohesive and compelling.
This exhibition is free and open to the public.
Gideon Barnett received his MFA from Yale University 2011 and his BA from Columbia College Chicago, 2005. Gideon's recent series of photographs are developed by accessing a library's expansive set of microfilm images catalogued under Schenk’s "The History of Photography." As he goes through the microfilm archive, he comes across obscure images that are filed and catalogued regardless of what their relationship is to the history of photography. After curating a selection of images, he sends them to print on a wide format Xerox that is connected to the film reader. The images abstracted from their sources become examples of photographic tropes, a history of representation. His focus of working in archives provokes the current state of institutional values supported by the NEA and NEH and how a society not only accesses information but also the varying degrees to which institutional values may or may not reflect those of the broader culture.
Michael Ciervo received his BFA from Pennsylvania of the Fine Arts, 2008. His paintings are intent, intentional, and intense but also mysterious in their quixotic sensuality. What remains is what is not said and what is distorted, cool by removal like a censored film still. Appearing as if a glance off a surveillance monitor, his paintings feel like the spawn of Vermeer and Christopher Williams. A window looks out into laden darkness—shrouded by scrimmed layers of codes. With much attention to process and detail, Ciervo’s paintings are rich with mysteriousness.
Micah Danges received his BFA from Kutztown University, 2001. His photographic constructions barely contain images at all—there is no physical figure or spatially grounded center. Danges’ photographs are embedded in frames and have a veiled presence, reflective and rich in pigmentation with disembodied images floating along the edges, burnished crystalline and immaculate. In process, the ultimate physical success of the object is left to complete chance: straddling the line of pure refinement or a retired failure. The viewer is struck with a void, generating an alienating quality while posing the question—are these photographs or sculptures, and is this necessary to contemplate in the presence of such dense beauty?
Samuel Hindolo received his BA from the University of Maryland, 2012. Aware of the expanding approaches to global film practices, Hindolo’s fixation on cinematic accretions draws heavily from redistributed footage of Nigerian cinema. Hindolo’s selection of still frames and images endure a weathering of substandard resolution through transferals and displacements before being realized into photocopies via gel photo-transfers. The finished product is an aggressive layer of information, obliterating communication as the stockpile that is now the painting manipulates linear images into a seemingly disparate field of fractured frames, toiling with the semiotic associations set by the spectator.
Peter Allen Hoffmann received his MFA from Hunter College of CUNY, 2005 and his BFA from Bard College, 2001. Hoffmann’s paintings attend to creating a dialogue with the history of art, exploring representation and abstraction. While the content varies from landscape to close up quilt patterns to still life, the scale of the canvas and the painterly technique are coherent, allowing the viewer to respond to the process of layering and editing as Hoffmann mines through a homage of an art historical canon.
Kelsey Halliday Johnson is an alumnus of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University. She received her interdisciplinary MFA at the University of Pennsylvania with a certificate in Landscape Architecture and holds her bachelor's degree in Art and Archaeology from Princeton University with a certificate in European Cultural Studies. Her work expands upon our evolving understanding of the authenticity of the photographic medium. The images have been sourced from Pennsylvania Game News, a kitsch magazine, which are then blown up, cropped and printed by a random algorithm. The images, reminiscent of Michelangelo Antonioni’s negatives, are processed until they reek of the simulacrum. In doing so their original archival sources become a plethora of post war architecture, becoming lost in the new act of seeing.
