Event

Counterpoint 2010: Approximating TruthPost an Event »

Togonon Gallery

July 15 - August 22, 2010

Info

http://www.togonongallery.com/
(415) 398-5572

77 Geary Street Second Floor San Francisco, CA 94108

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Judy Wu "Holiday Sequel - The Duel - Nasha and Yiyi", Porcelain, glaze, and acrylic paint on Luster Print, 2008

In its second annual exhibition showcasing contemporary photographic practices in the West Coast, Togonon Gallery presents Approximating Truth, Counterpoint 2010. A catalog accompanies the show. The four artists in the exhibition, Seza Bali, Dean Dempsey, Nadim Sabella and Judy Wu explore notions of truth in photography by employing a variety of devices, including technical interventions and contrived manipulations to blur distinctions between fiction and truth. To reshape the question of what’s real, Bali combines traditional photography and digital technology while Dempsey stages situations that have never occurred using theatricality and physical alterations. Further, Judy Wu handcrafts porcelain figures to create characters to depict unconventional stories and characters. Finally, Sabella combines model-making and photography to fabricate cinematic dreamscapes that explore perceptions of memory and renewal. All four are Bay Area transplants who found inspiration in the West Coast with their contemporary explorations of the traditionalphotographic themes of landscape and portraiture. Seza Bali’s “Highway 1 Overlook” depicts a panoramic section of California’s Pacific Coast Highway, gloriously sunlit turf and surf, but digitally altered—made symmetrical (though the axis of symmetry is off-center)—so that it becomes an archipelago, or a gigantic cetacean. Dean Dempsey’s “Leftover” depicts a domestic scene turned surrealist, as a woman, headless and equipped with only one arm and one leg, spills her morning tea, the cup bearing the familiar umbrella-toting Morton’s Salt girl walking in the rain. Nadim Sabella’s “In a Fog IV” depicts Mario Botta’s iconic San Francisco Museum of Modern Art building, with its layer-cake brick stripes, enveloped in fog—a real-world view of the fog dome souvenirs sold in the gift shop. Judy Wu’s “The New Majority III” explores American demographics, depicting eight young members of the emerging multiracial tossed salad that seem to have been modeled in clay or modeling compound, colorfully dressed and painted, and then re-photographed against white backgrounds, in an array; they thus combine the conventions of Richard Avedon’s portraiture and Bernd and Hilla Becher’s studies of unconscious visual culture.

Nadim Sabella "In a Fog IV", 2010

Dean Dempsey "Left/over" Fragmentations series, 2010