Gillian Wearing: People: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

May 5 - June 24, 2011
Installation Views
Press release

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is pleased to present a major solo exhibition of work by Gillian Wearing. In a wide-ranging vocabulary, Wearing presents a profound selection of work that spans the breadth of her production since her last solo exhibition in New York in 2003. Featuring video installations, photographic series and sculptural work, the exhibition will
occupy both floors and all four public gallery spaces. Continuing the artist's renowned and influential exploration of identity, performance and storytelling, Wearing describes narratives that land strikingly between the public and private, fiction and documentary, the raw improvisation and the carefully staged. Projecting these issues through a lens of personal memory, cultural history and the media, a unique and compelling psychological resonance persists throughout.

 

In the main gallery space on the ground floor, Snapshot is a monumental seven-channel video installation that pays homage to the evolution of still photography through the implementation of moving images. Tracing the evolution of still portraiture throughout the passage of time, an explicit timeline of sorts is presented, informed by old photographs but evoked through moving imagery. Seven different women at various stages of life, from youth to old age, are depicted on seven monitors corresponding to eras in the 20th century, as an anonymous narrator describes memories that are at once personal and universal.




All installation images above: Photo by Jean Vong