Photo/ Drawings
April 25 - June 14, 2002

Senior & Shopmaker Gallery is pleased to announce Mary Miss: Photo/Drawings, an exhibition of photo-collages by the renowned sculptor and public artist.  Spanning the fields of architecture, landscape design, sculpture, and installation art, Miss’s work challenges conventional ways of seeing the landscape we inhabit.  Her public commissions, which range from altered topographic landscapes to architectural constructions, occupy sites as diverse as New York City’s Hudson River waterfront and underground subway, a wetland in Iowa, and a forest in Finland.

A rarely seen aspect of Miss’s work are her photo/drawings: collages in which several photographic views of a single structure or site are spliced together to form an altered whole.  Inspired by her travels to the Yucatan, New Guinea, Eastern Europe, North Africa, and Asia, Miss has always photographed unexpected structures and architectural sites.  Many of these pictures inform a significant part of her public sculpture projects.  It was in 1990, during an artist-residency at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, that Miss began layering her photographs, creating collages whose outer edges formed irregular contours.  As their emphasis on light and abstract pattern attests, the photo/drawings convey the experience of a particular space rather than strict documentation.  The re-invention of existing structures and the observation of a site from different perspectives link the photo/drawings with the concerns of her three-dimensional projects.  They also provide an emotional reference and memory of place that resonates in her large outdoor works. 

Although correspondences exist between Miss’s photo/drawings and the photographs of Gordon Matta-Clark, Jan Dibbets, and Robert Smithson, each artist approaches landscape and architectural space differently.  For Miss, the photo/drawings mediate between two opposing tendencies: a desire to record actual place versus the desire to construct space out of pictorial illusion.

Mary Miss has been included in numerous museum exhibitions throughout this country and abroad.  A fully illustrated monograph of her work will be published by Princeton Architectural Press in Summer 2002, and will include essays by Daniel Abramson, Joseph Giovannini, and Eleanor Heartney.  Current projects include a temporary memorial for the World Trade Center, riverfront reclamation in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and outdoor sculptures for the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, and for the Thomas Eagleton Courthouse in St. Louis, Missouri. In 2001, she was awarded the New York City Masterworks Award by the Municipal Art Society as well as the Centennial Medal from the American Academy in Rome.

Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday, 10 am to 6 pm, and Saturday 11 am to 6 pm.  For further information, please contact Betsy Senior or Laurence Shopmaker.