Curated by Martha Buskirk
Members' Preview Reception Saturday, September 8, 6 - 8 p.m.
The Danforth Museum of Art is pleased to welcome Martha Buskirk as guest curator of the exhibition, Information, Insight, Interruption, as part of their New England Currents series of exhibitions showcasing work by regional artists and curators. Shown concurrently with the 2007 New England Photography Biennial, the exhibition will be on view from September 9 - October 21, 2007. There will be an opening reception for all fall exhibitions on Saturday, September 8, from 6 - 8 pm.
About the Exhibit
Bringing together the works of four photographers, Barbara Bosworth, E. E. Smith, Shellburne Thurber, and Liselot van der Heijden, this exhibition offers a unique opportunity to see a comparative exploration of contemporary work in which photography’s role as document provides as a starting point to address a range of provocative issues.
About the Artists
Barbara Bosworth’s photographs of champion trees are part of an extended exploration of our connection to the environment that has also included a series of hunters, and another of stars. Her work has been exhibited widely and she has been the recipient of numerous grants, including a Guggenheim. Her book Trees: National Champions, with essays by John Stilgoe and Doug Nickel, was published by MIT Press in 2005.
E. E. Smith has taken up an array of historic photographic processes to reinterpret both her own photographs, as in the series based on her snapshots of other drivers, and found images drawn from family albums and a variety of other sources. She has had a series of solo shows, including her current exhibition at the Kim Foster Gallery in New York, where she is exhibiting photographs of the sun and moon in conjunction with sculptural forms.
Shellburne Thurber has explored different types of interior spaces, including hotel rooms, abandoned houses, and the photographs of psychoanalysts’ offices from which the works in this exhibition were drawn. She has had numerous solo shows in New York, Boston, and elsewhere, and the psychoanalytic series was supported by a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Liselot van der Heijden has exhibited photographs, video, and video-based installations in the United States and Europe. Her work has incorporated her own photographs, including the series from natural history museums exhibited here, video that she has shot, and various types of found footage, with a continuing emphasis on the nature of spectatorship and the politics of representation.
About the Curator
Martha Buskirk is Professor of art history and criticism at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, Massachusetts, where she has taught since 1994. She is author of The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art (MIT Press, 2003), and she is currently pursuing work on a new book, Seeing through the Museum: Art, Life, Commerce, which examines intersections between museum history and contemporary artistic practices that evoke conventions associated with the collection, souvenir, relic, and archive. In addition to these projects, Buskirk has served as the former managing editor of October magazine and has co-edited the publication The Duchamp Effect with Mignon Nixon (MIT Press, 1996), as well as The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents (MIT Press, 1990) and Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc (Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, 1988), both with Clara Weyergraf-Serra. Buskirk earned her Ph.D. in art history from the City University of New York Graduate Center, and has held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2000-2001, the Clark Art Institute in 2004, and the Henry Moore Institute in 2006.
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