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Exhibitions
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click image below for video link: The Same Thing
Jef Bourgeau’s mature camera style is so strong that it can even shroud a street lamp, so that, instead of light, it seemingly emits darkness and shadows. His vision drapes geometrically clashing urban beauty with the sooty persona of its denizens.
The application of light and shadow is painterly and yet contemporary at the same time, hinting at dark emotions. There is a sense of forced isolation, of two people sharing a space yet disconnected, of a room within rooms.
His work is a quiet poetry of understatement and misdirection. As our eyes drift across Bourgeau’s photographs in search of a resting point, we invest the dark spaces between with a symbolic value: the alienation of life in an increasingly urbanized world.
- Jan van der Marck
CHANGING CITIES: DETROIT
@
ThreeWalls in Chicago
February 22 through March 22
Sister cities in America’s Midwest, both historically and culturally, Chicago and Detroit are suddenly swapping artists:
On the heels of its recent exhibition of Chicago artists in Michigan, the Museum of New Art (MONA) in collaboration with ThreeWalls is launching this fresh initiative in Chicago.
Detroit is famous for its music, but remains perfectly unknown for its art. Yet, the city itself rages with underground galleries and guerilla projects. All of which tags Detroit as the last frontier for contemporary art. Changing Cities is the first step in establishing a global awareness plan, a project that swaps Detroit artists with artists from other cities.
The range of medium and subject from these five Detroit artists infuses this initial exchange with the diversity of Detroit’s underground art scene - transplanted for a month to Chicago.
including:
Hartmut Austen
Jef Bourgeau
Mary Fortuna
Alison Wong
Jef Bourgeau (City Lights Installation)
An undiagnosed dyslexic, Jef Bourgeau never finished his education. He spent his teen years working at a box factory in his home town of Detroit. During that time, utilizing the materials at hand, he began to make and experiment with several pinhole cameras. The work from these rudimentary cameras developed into dark, moody photographs. Bourgeau has since remarked that he can only see "right" through a camera lens.
Bourgeau first exhibited his work in 1991. Within four years his art was showing in galleries and museums from New York to California, and Europe to Asia. However, Bourgeau withdrew from the art scene in 1996 to concentrate on founding Detroit's contemporary museum. Over the last decade, this alternative museum has exhibited hundreds of emerging and established artists from around the globe. Of these, Bourgeau has organized and curated more than 100 exhibitions and projects. Although retaining his position as founding director, Bourgeau has recently begun to exhibit his art once again.
ThreeWalls is located at:
119 Peoria, #2A/2D
Chicago