Richard Barnes: Animal Logic (front and center galleries)

Richard Barnes: Animal Logic (front and center galleries)
Light Show for UNESCO (HH Project Space): Gretchen Bennett, Claudia Fitch, Jenny Heishman, Heide Hinrichs. Jeffry Mitchell, Matthew Offenbacher

FRONT AND CENTER GALLERIES

Richard Barnes' ongoing series Animal Logic is a behind-the-scenes look at natural history museums around the world; we get to see the panoramas, the shipping containers, and animals wrapped in plastic while construction workers build trompe l'oeuil backdrops for their display. Barnes' intest in the museum began as an examination of the role the museum plays in our understanding of ourselves through the act of collection, presevation and display. He explores the museum as container of objects of the celebrated and forgotten, the odd and the everyday, representative of the aspirations and the desires of the person, culture or nation that assembled it. Barnes' large scale photographs are haunting meditations on the way we releate to the natural world and our seemingly endless need for classification and organization as a way to control and tame our experience of the 'wild'. The terrifying beauty of the sublime is held in check by man-made structures and order, yet the careful balance is both precarious and fragile.

Richard Barnes is a nationally renowned architectural and archaelogical photographer and a regular contributor to the New York Times and a number of other newspapers and magazines. He was awarded the prestigious Rome Prize in 2005, and has exhibited his work in numerous museums and galleries. His work is included in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Eastman House International Center for Photography, to mention but a few.

HOWARD HOUSE PROJECT SPACE presents:

Light Show for UNESCO illuminates the project room at Howard House with care and attention usually accorded important architectural landmarks (exemplified by UNESCO World Heritage Cultural Sites such as the Giza pyramid complex in Egypt). The grotto-like room at the far back of Howard Howard is a powerful manifestation of the fragility of the artist-dealer-collector complex, the opportunity and risk inherent in operating a small family business, and the delicate margins of marginal activities. Light Show tries to evoke wonder that such a place exists at all.

Since the 1960s, artists such as Marcel Broodthers, Michael Asher, and Andrea Fraser have turned the methods and systems of art institutions back on themselves to reveal hidden power structures. This important work of "institutional critique" has identified many of the fundamental contradictions and hypocrisies of sites which present and distribute art. Light Show asks: what if this dialectical practice was inverted? The opposite of critique is not sincerity (as many seem to think) but praise. This exhibition proposes UNESCO's rhetoric of securing unique and special places is a model that can be applied to the small and transitory just as well as to the mighty and permanent.

The modest artist-curated table-top exhibition which accompanies Light Show furthers this theme, focusing on the site of production. It applies the broad goals of the UNESCO mandate (1. to promote diversity, 2. to mobilise active forces, and 3. to fertilise) to a small slice of the local artist community. The artists included are Gretchen Bennett, Claudia Fitch, Jenny Heishman, Heide Hinrichs. Jeffry Mitchell, Matthew Offenbacher (who also curated the show).