DC -- American University -- Katzen Arts Center -- 2019A Winter Exhibit: The Gifts of Tony Podesta:
Bruce Guthrie Photos Home Page: [Click here] to go to Bruce Guthrie Photos home page.
Description of Pictures: The Gifts of Tony Podesta
Curated by Klaus Ottmann and Jennifer Sakai
January 26-March 17, 2019
This first major exhibition drawn from our Corcoran Legacy Collection features strong and provocative photography and sculpture donated by Tony Podesta over the past decade to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, now part of the American University Museum’s holdings. Podesta has earned the reputation of being a fearless supporter of challenging contemporary art by women. He is an important patron of the arts nationally and internationally, with an outsized impact all across the Washington art world.
Recognize anyone? If you recognize specific folks (or other stuff) and I haven't labeled them, please identify them for the world. Click the little pencil icon underneath the file name (just above the picture). Spammers need not apply.
Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
Accessing as Spider: The system has identified your IP as being a spider. IP Address: 3.145.191.22 -- Domain: Amazon Technologies
I love well-behaved spiders! They are, in fact, how most people find my site. Unfortunately, my network has a limited bandwidth and pictures take up bandwidth. Spiders ask for lots and lots of pages and chew up lots and lots of bandwidth which slows things down considerably for regular folk. To counter this, you'll see all the text on the page but the images are being suppressed. Also, some system options like merges are being blocked for you.
Note: Permission is NOT granted for spiders, robots, etc to use the site for AI-generation purposes. I'm sure you're thrilled by your ability to make revenue from my work but there's nothing in that for my human users or for me.
If you are in fact human, please email me at guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can check if your designation was made in error. Given your number of hits, that's unlikely but what the hell.
Help? The Medium (Email) links are for screen viewing and emailing. You'll want bigger sizes for printing. [Click here for additional help]
KATPOD_190125_27.JPG: EXHIBITION CONTAINS MATURE CONTENT
All the sculptures assembled in this exhibition possess a strong material presence, differing only "in the material and modes of their expression:" Ernesto Neto's playful, soft, biomorphic sculptures are materializations of sensate and haptic experiences; Jone Kvie's stainless-steel atomic mushroom clouds, materializations of subliminal fear; Patricia Piccinini's animatronic silicon creatures, materializations of the Other. Gyan Panchal's alchemical objects are re-materializations of the discards of modern society; Janaina Tschäpe's water-filled latex condoms are the materializations of unspoken desires; while Jake and Dinos Chapman's irreverent dioramas are materializations of industrial genocide.
In the works by these and other artists on view, the faith of "believing in what we cannot know" is allied with a certain tautological knowledge, the Minimalist's credo of "what you see is what you see." This tautological certitude is the promise of a spiritual materiality that substitutes minimalist formalist for the historical responsibility of forms.
Klaus Ottmann, Curator
KATPOD_190126_20.JPG: Jake and Dinos Chapman
Rape of Creativity, 1999
KATPOD_190126_56.JPG: When taking a photograph, the image-maker can direct the image in one of two ways. The first possibility is fully committing to the moment as witnessed. The second direction constructs a narrative or point of view to the image that pulls the viewer into the world the photographer invites them to enter. One can see these transmutations in the photographic work assembled in the Podesta Collection.
Mads Gamdrup presents this transformation in landscapes that stretch horizontally across the sky, consistent in view. He presents the land as idealized in a stylized and repeated scene, yet universal in the way we recognize it as an earthly terrain. Anna Gaskell constructs a chronicle of images filled with references to gothic fiction, fairytales, and myth. These scenes engage the viewer with a vision imbued with secrecy and intimacy, a story that is not revealed to us-but one that we experience through mood and symbolism. In Clare Langan's Forty Below film stills, we follow the movement of a solitary figure as she walks through a shadowy blue-green post- apocalyptic world. Land is shown in a dark palette with cool tones that suggest the unknown, landscape-friend or foe.
The Gifts of Tony Podesta allows us to meditate on the experience and reinvention of portrait narrative and the landscape as an unknown terrain, inviting us to interpret our connection to those evocations. In this way Tony Podesta created beguiling and mysterious narratives, which leave us space to reinvent both the figures we view and the environment that surrounds them.
Jennifer Sakai, Curator
KATPOD_190126_58.JPG: This first major exhibition drawn from our Corcoran Legacy Collection features strong and provocative photography and sculpture donated by Tony Podesta over the past decade to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, now part of the American University Museum's holdings. Podesta has earned the reputation of being a fearless supporter of challenging contemporary art by women. He is an important patron of the arts nationally and internationally, with an outsized impact across the Washington art world.
KATPOD_190126_66.JPG: Gyan Panchal
untitled, 2010
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.)
I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
Connection Not Secure messages? Those warnings you get from your browser about this site not having secure connections worry some people. This means this site does not have SSL installed (the link is http:, not https:). That's bad if you're entering credit card numbers, passwords, or other personal information. But this site doesn't collect any personal information so SSL is not necessary. Life's good!