Baldwin Gallery Opens Exhibition by Doug and Mike Starn and Delia Brown
ASPEN, CO.- The Baldwin Gallery presents its fifth show with Doug and Mike Starn. Identical twins who work collaboratively, the Starns are internationally recognized for their transcendent photography. They have now enlarged the scope of their work to include installation with their Big Bambu project that began in 2008: a network of more than 2,500 fresh-cut 30-40 foot long bamboo poles lashed together. The Baldwin Gallery exhibition offers a keyhole view of this seminal architectural installation through various scale photographic archival inkjet prints and videos that the artist shot on site at Big Bambu. The artists took 250 images to record Big Bambu, using a 128-lens camera in a grid format and stitched them together to create lustrous photographic works that reflect the magnitude and complex nature of this installation. Big Bambu, a continuous work in progress, is “like an organism,” says Doug Starn. “It’s a reflection of what it is to grow, change and develop anything – a person, family, a city.”
The title of Delia Brown´s show, Women, refers to the iconic idea of Woman as a historical subject of the Arts, both personifying allegorical attributes (Virtue, Truth, Harmony, etc.), and as the object of the gaze
The Starns, who often work with layered, digitally altered photographic material will also show several distinct bodies of recent work, including: the alleverythingthatisyou series, the spectacular body of work entitled Structure of Thought, and unique four-color carbon prints. In the alleverythingthatisyou series, snowflakes in northern Vermont and upstate New York were photographed using a microscopic lens that records each snow crystal in the few seconds between landing and melting. The Structure of Thought series comprises of beautifully textured compositions of trees, branches and vines printed with dense black inks on sections of translucent mulberry paper. Also being shown are the carbon prints of Shi-Tenno and Manjushri where the Starn brothers mingle gilding techniques to the painterly photo process to create photographs of Buddhist statuary.
Doug and Mike Starns’ art has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries worldwide. Major artworks by the Starns are represented in public and private collections including: The Museum of Modern Art (NYC); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SF); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, (NYC); The Jewish Museum, (NYC); The Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC); The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC); Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan; La Bibliotèque Nationale, Paris; La Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, amongst many others.
In addition, Los Angeles based artist Delia Brown has her 2nd show with the Baldwin Gallery entitled Women, which features 6 small oil paintings and 7 gouache drawings. Though young, Ms. Brown has received considerable attention and subsequent press for her work, which – as in her previous Baldwin Gallery show, Guerilla Lounging: Aspen – often paints pictures of privilege and power, while simultaneously yet more discreetly illuminating the differences in class and inherent values that exist in the modern world. While her work commonly exposes opulent scenery, the artist is divulging an edgier estimation of her surroundings than at first meets the eye.
The title of her show, Women, refers to the iconic idea of Woman as a historical subject of the Arts, both personifying allegorical attributes (Virtue, Truth, Harmony, etc.), and as the object of the gaze. This dualistic perception of femininity – whereby Woman is represented as either the embodiment of piety, or conversely, the site of sexual desire – stands in contrast to the intimate-cocktail-parties-cum-guerrilla-games Brown and her friends engage in as they both inhabit and disrupt feminine clichés and personae.
Several of the scenes in Women depict Brown and her friends cavorting in private spaces they have gained access to play in. In other scenes, the women are disco dolls in a penthouse having what would appear to be a Pre-Party Before A Night at Studio 57. In the Freaky Frida series, the women have grown rather conspicuous facial hair and appear to be marrying each other here or running a brothel there. A more contemplative angle emerges in Reading in the Red Room 2, a moody revival of Brown’s 2003 project Forsaken Lover. In Sappho Mourns Her Lost Virginity, an ethereal blonde in white pumps and panties, with a head of hair so lush it can only be a wig, wistfully looks up at the sky. And in Felicity Begins to Lose It, a big-eyed young woman clings to a large and creepy totemic sculpture, appearing to be having an encounter with her own inner demons, despite the brightness of her surroundings.
The public is invited to meet the artists at the opening reception on February 12th from 6-8 pm.
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