Opening Reception With The Artists
Friday, November 3, 2006
6:00-8:00 pm

Christenberry Book Signing & West Catalogue Signing
Saturday, November 4th 10:30am
*please call to reserve, 404-233-3739

Through simple forms, American photographer William Christenberry reveals the passage of time and the loss of an era. His photographs record the process of change while documenting the decomposition of structures, land, and places he knows and loves from his home. Jackson Fine Art is pleased to present a collection of Christenberry's digital pigment prints made from annual trips to Alabama and Tennessee from 1966-84, along with several large-format prints and found object sculpture.

Originally from Hale County, Alabama, a place made famous by the photographs of Christenberry's mentor and friend Walker Evans, Christenberry's work pictures familiar scenes of his home. Each photograph excerpts color-saturated architectural and narrative scenes from their specific context, making the viewer conscious that they are evidence of a fleeting time and place. While we might recognize these monuments made permanent in Christenberry's work, we also know that they are undergoing a constant, yet beautiful process of decomposition. As Christenberry says, "It occurred to me about ten years ago to go back to the same place year after year and to make another picture close to the same vantage point. There's an aesthetic to the aging process." A solitary red house with a door-frame filled in by bricks, a general store with a sloping awning that looks permanently broken, these forms contribute to the quiet wistfulness that pervades Christenberry's oeu vre.

Alongside Christenberry, Jackson Fine Art is pleased to present new photographs by Atlanta-based artist Angela West. Like Christenberry's, West's work is inspired by where she comes from. The show, Little Deaths features the product of West's visits home to Dahlonega, Georgia: the artist employs the people and place that she loves as subjects of her luminous and emotionally compelling photographs. As they chronicle seemingly familiar and lasting structures and individuals, her photographs simultaneously exude a quiet uncanniness, a quality that reminds the viewer of their impermanence and fleeting familiarity. West has long made use of her own family members in her work; they function in tandem with her landscapes to create a sense of place both for the artist and the viewer.

The idea of memory and loss haunts her work, as many of her subjects are architectural or landscape based elements once so familiar, but now foreign to her. A house that once belonged to her childhood friends is now occupied by strangers, the daycare she used to attend is now overgrown and hidden by years of neglect. West certainly plays with the idea of how we remember, capturing recognizable places and people that will eventually pass on and out of our lives. We feel in her photographs a sense of the ephemeral, and through the beauty of her forms, we mourn the loss of the familiar. Through West's work, we address the disappointment that comes from recognizing that things never appear now quite as we remember them.

William Christenberry (b.1936, Tuscaloosa, AL) has been a professor at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, Washington D.C, since 1968. Following his first solo exhibition in 1961, his work has been the subject of dozens of solo and group exhibitions, and is now found in the permanent collections of many institutions, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Phillips Collection, Washington DC, the Museum of Modern Art and The Whitney Museum, New York, and the High Museum, Atlanta, GA. Mr. Christenberry lives and works in Washington, DC.

Angela West received her MFA in 2000 from Yale University. Her work was most recently included in the group exhibition New Photography at the High Museum, Atlanta, GA, and this fall her work will appear in a solo exhibition at the Columbus Museum, Columbus, GA. Her work is included in many public and private collections including the Hirshhorn, Washington DC, The Ogden Museum, New Orleans, LA, and the collection of Sir Elton John.

Jackson Fine Art is an established and internationally known gallery. Founded in 1990, the gallery is located at 3115 East Shadowlawn Ave. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10-5pm. Jackson Fine Art can be reached at 404.233.3739 visited at www.jacksonfineart.com or PennHouse Productions 404.880.0035 [email protected].