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Email PageYale MFA Photography Thesis Show
June 9, 2006- July 19, 2006
Lisa Albaugh, Marisa Baumgartner, Tommi Cahill, Craig Doty, Jenny Drumgoole, Daniel Gordon, Colin Montgomery, Allison Sexton, Spencer Young
Baumgartner Gallery
522 W 24th St Jenny Drumgoole HUSKY (2006) |  Lisa Albaugh Untitled (Pastry Chef) (2005) |  Marisa Baumgartner Visible City (Obstructions V) (2006) |
Lisa Albaugh’s work (Everything and Nothing, and So Much of Both) has something to do with the way people work at a job they hate 358 days a year just to enjoy one week of uninterrupted peace and happiness. It is also about how some people own so much stuff that the things have a life of their own, whereas others don’t own or even have a place for their nothings. Her work confirms the sheer scope of the imaginable and the smallness of it too. Throughout, there is a sense of fragility while contrasting subjects and styles allude to the current promiscuity of photography.
Marisa Baumgartner’s images speak of the overwhelming diminutive yet expansive sensation of self that is caused by the vastness of space, society and history. A distancing is employed to speak of something deeply personal in a universal way, placing a screen between the subject and the viewer as a psychological apparatus. These images are also largely about photography itself, an attempt at deconstructing abstraction in an art historical context and painterly manner via the camera. Embracing the new medium of the digital they attempt to understand where photography places itself in art today.
Tommi Cahill’s photographs picture frat houses, roadside inns with rooms methodically decorated in 109 different themes varying from William Tell to Daisy Mae. A dilapidated mansion with chandeliers in the form of winged cherubs which are clutching light-filled orbs. One discovers Cheerleaders, tour groups, amusement park goers and anyone or thing that has an intimate relationship to the spectacle as a way of life or merely existing in it on borrowed time. These pictures were driven by her fascination with pageantry, sexuality, and gender, from the utterly mundane to the inexplicably garish.
It is Craig Doty’s hope that the images he creates can convey some sense of dread and awfulness he sees present in the world. A minister shot by his wife in the night, a young man massacring his fellow students, a young girl kidnapped and raped, a father killing his wife and unborn child; these events are all part of our society and are very real. His photographs are not meant as representations of these events but rather channel these incidents into an emotional state portrayed in the work.
Jenny Drumgoole’s single channel video entitled: HUSKY (2006) describes the conflict of a divided self, a battle between the ego and a raging wild woman id called Husky. The video is loosely divided in five chapters and draws from different genres of video/television/filmmaking, including westerns, music videos, reality television, and hidden camera surveillance. Like the two characters of the divided self, the piece is rooted in both reality and fantasy, and the blurring of the two. The issues of gender, desire, celebrity, consumption, popular culture and a fascination with the absurdity of the human condition are central in the work. It is about contemporary culture, as well as my place as an active participant and consumer of it.
Daniel Gordon’s process by which he makes these pictures is as follows: he finds images on the Internet and constructs a near-life-size dimensional tableau, which he then photographs. He does this daily. The nebulous, vulgar (that is, common) space accessed through the Internet is his raw material. The resulting pictures depict fictions that he has fashioned vaguely after his own realities—and they remain definitively imaginary.
Colin Montgomery’s large format photographs were taken in response to the tension between his conception of America, the American landscape, the American personality and the physical and psychological realities of those three ideas. This conflict manifests itself through the burden and violence of decoration including the antagonistic relationship between the individuals, their surrounding environments and the anthropomorphized emoting of the landscapes. The project ultimately responds to the complicit moral culpability Americans share in the daily unfolding of political and military events around the globe.
Allison Sexton’s photographs come out of personal experience. As the mysterious death of her brother brought her back to the place she calls “home”, she found herself in a two-year haze, almost accidentally documenting the mourning process that ran so thick in the air. The places she produces have been seen before but collectively attempt to reinvigorate the experience of visual culture today. Her aim is to evoke sentiments of irony and melancholy in order to emphasize what she feels is the ultimate paradox of the human condition, a static territory between growth and decay. This tension is mimicked throughout her oeuvre, from objective vision and subjective content to found imagery and manipulated scenarios. She seeks representations of presence through absence, contemplating the meaning of subtle gestures that can be found in the landscape. Through this contemplation of subtleties and semiotics she is able to better able to understand and convey the way in which we live individually and communally.
Spencer Young photographs the theatricality of objects and space in the everyday world. The images he produces have been seen before but collectively attempt to reinvigorate the experience of visual culture today. His aim is to evoke sentiments of irony and melancholy in order to emphasize what he feels is the ultimate paradox of the human condition, a static territory between growth and decay. This tension is mimicked throughout his oeuvre, from objective vision and subjective content to found imagery and manipulated scenarios. He seeks representations of presence through absence, contemplating the meaning of subtle gestures that can be found in the landscape. Through this contemplation of subtleties and semiotics he is able to better understand and convey the way in which we live individually and communally.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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