Antony Hegarty
Zipora Fried
Joan Jonas
Nancy Holt
Thiago Rocha Pitta
Patti Smith
Dark Paradise
Curated by Tim Goossens
The Clocktower Gallery
2/5/13 – 4/1/13
Patti Smith, Mountain, Iceland, 2006. © Patti Smith. Courtesy the artist and Robert Miller Gallery
The Clocktower Gallery presents Dark Paradise, an exhibition of photography, video and collage -both by prominent and emerging artists- which exemplifies contemporary discourse and storytelling through the canon of landscape imagery. The artists either engage physically with the landscape, or capture in a poetic -and only at first glance dark- traces of the past within (fictitious) vistas and historically charged places.
Artists: Antony Hegarty, Zipora Fried, Nancy Holt, Joan Jonas, Thiago Rocha Pitta, and Patti Smith.
The exhibition developed out of a fascination for tracing the tradition of the sublime landscape in contemporary images, a genre that forcefully developed in painting in the late 18th century with masters such as Caspar David Friedrich, who coupled the sublime with awe and fear of nature, and from a search of finding these same emotions in more intimate, local, and poetic images created by artists working with small scale works. All the works in the exhibition exclude human figures and, independent of scale, evoke feelings of an undefined presence of the past or of a world still undiscovered.