2 Photos
[caption id="attachment_48205" align="alignnone" width="800"] Connie Fox (American, born 1925), Self As M.B. in Tux II, 2007. Acrylic on paper, 22 1/2 x 15 1/4 inches. Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York. Gift of the artist, 2011.16v. Brian Gaman (American, 1948 - 2014), Untitled, 1988.Sand, cast aluminum, 18 x 24 x 24 inches each. Collection of the artist. Photo © Kevin Noble. Lindsay Morris (American, born 1966), I Am, 2012. Archival pigment print, 45 x 45 inches.[/caption]
The Parrish Art Museum presents Parrish Perspectives, a series of concentrated exhibitions that allows the museum to respond spontaneously and directly to unique ways of thinking about art, artists, and the creative process, on view from March 13 through April 24. The three distinct exhibitions — Connie Fox: Self As...; Brian Gaman: Vanishing Point; and Lindsay Morris: You Are You — provide visitors with the opportunity to experience timely, relevant work, on view for the first time in a Museum, by these nationally recognized artists with close ties to the East End of Long Island.
Connie Fox: Self As... features an innovative self-portrait series in which Ms. Fox melds her own image with self-portraits by German painter Max Beckmann(1884–1950) and photographs of French writer Colette (1873–1954). Brian Gaman: Vanishing Point presents a survey selection of the late artist’s signature series of sculptures and monumentally scaled digital works on paper. Lindsay Morris: You Are You focuses on photographs from Ms. Morris’s documentation of a summer camp for gender-nonconforming children and their families.
“Parrish Perspectives allows the Museum to curate exhibitions with a sense of spontaneity and immediacy,” said Parrish Art Museum Director Terrie Sultan. “The drawings in Connie Fox: Self As… were recently gifted to the Museum by the artist and reveal a singular aspect of her work; the untimely loss of Brian Gaman is recognized by Vanishing Point, with work that provides a portal into the artist’s creative process; and Lindsay Morris: You Are You presents lyrical photographs from her recently published book.”
In 2007, inspired by self-portraits by Beckmann and photographs of Colette (Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette), Ms. Fox began a series of drawings in her East Hampton studio that proved to be a marked departure from her six-decade practice as an abstract painter. During some 30 years on the East End of Long Island, Ms. Fox has charted the ebb and flow of the natural world with a bold gestural abstraction. In Self As…, she trains those keen powers of observation inwards to examine the construction of self.
“In this group of drawings, completed in just a few weeks, Fox delves into an investigation of self,” said Alicia Longwell, the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Chief Curator at the Museum. “The drawings allowed the Parrish to preserve, and now to present, this extraordinary body of work.”
Beginning in the mid-1970s Mr. Gaman embarked on a highly personal exploration on the nature and process of perception, which became a sustaining theme throughout his career. Gaman sought in all his work to express a visual language that is seductive and unknowable and through his creative process, he explored the distance between reality and the perception of it. Vanishing Point features a survey selection of the artist’s signature series: ambiguous sculptures that rest on the border between industrial cast-offs and intricate, almost magical machines; and enigmatic, large-scale digital works on paper that suggest emotionally compelling meaning can be teased from the simplest of visual gestures.
Ms. Morris began documenting a weekend summer camp for gender-nonconforming children and their families in 2007 — an ongoing project that has garnered the Sag Harbor-based photographer worldwide attention. The documentation led to Morris’s first book, “You Are You,” recently published in partnership with Kehrer Verlag (2015). Lindsay Morris: You Are You presents 35 images from this body of work—lyrical photographs that convey humanity and universality, and express the joyfulness in children allowed the freedom to be themselves in a haven, surrounded by their peers, family, and caregivers. According to Morris, “I intend to reach beyond the confines of the camp to contribute to a dialogue about the crucial role that support plays in the lives of children who do not conform to society's expectations.”
