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Press Releases

 September 14, 2012

University Art Museum to Host Rachel Foullon: Braided Sun and Dana Hoey: The Phantom Sex
On view October 5 through December 8, 2012

Artists' Reception: Saturday, October 6, 4 - 6 pm

Artists’ Gallery Talk:Tuesday, October 9, 5:30 pm

Fall Festival and Homecoming Tours: Saturday, October 13, 11:00 am and 1:00 pm

Free and open to the public
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 ALBANY, NY--- The University Art Museum is pleased to present sculptures by Rachel Foullon and photographs by Dana Hoey in two concurrent exhibitions this fall.

Dana Hoey: The Phantom Sex features 29 photographs spanning her career and marking the first time in over ten years that her most recent work has been examined in relation to previous bodies of work. Hoey has explored what it means to be female through her photography for more than twenty years. Using both staged and directed photography, her meticulously con-structed pictures speak to her deep knowledge of photography and its ability to conflate fiction and fact. Often compared to other "girl photographers" who came to prominence in the late 1990s, art historian and critic, Katy Siegel noted that the emergence of this group signaled the first generation of artists to "take for granted the twin (if antithetical) lessons of Cindy Sherman and Nan Goldin.”

Hoey began her work photographing friends in a narrative manner often focusing on the cruel, troubled, and invisible dynamics of female relationships. More recently, she has expanded her vision to include scenarios in which older women play central roles and typically female activities take on elevated status. In a calculated and targeted departure from previous work, Pattern Recognition (2006), combines original and appropriated images arranged into kaleidoscopic patterns, juxtaposing Hoey’s own portraits of older woman, with porn nudes, and more simple portraits of sexualized women, all over the age of 40. Hoey’s most recent work suggests the metaphoric and associative possibilities inherent in a slower, more solitary imagining of female identity. Resin casts of her own body and friends’ bodies, found sculptures, and plastic tarps, serve as stand-ins for her former human subjects. Mistrusting the veneer of the empowered female, Hoey has turned her vision to larger truths, and perhaps within this fragile and mysterious terrain lies the promise of a more evolved and balanced approach to “seeing” women through the camera’s lens.

Dana Hoey was born in 1966 in San Francisco, California. She lives and works in New York. Selected solo exhibitions include Experiments in Primitive Living at the Center for Art Design and Visual Culture, University of Maryland in Baltimore, Maryland (2010); Experiments in Primitive Living at Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York City (2008); Pattern Recognition at Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York City (2006); Moon Bitches at Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York City (2002); Dana Hoey at Tache-Levy in Brussels, Belgium (2001); and Dana Hoey at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. (2000). Selected group exhibition include We Pictured You Reading This at Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, South Carolina (2010); Found on Facebook at the Arthur M. Berger Art Gallery, Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York (2010); Muse at the Wildenberg Art Center, Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana (2010); and Born in the morning, dead by night at Leo Koenig, Inc. in New York City (2009). She received a B.A. in Philosophy from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut and an M.F.A. in photography from Yale University School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut.


The exhibition will be accompanied by a 104-page fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Johanna Burton. The catalogue will be distributed by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc.

Rachel Foullon: Braided Sun presents over ten years of discreet sculptures and larger installations in which found materials, cedar boards, and hand-dyed canvas reference a former agrarian existence based on utilitarian need that has long been subsumed by modern progress. Foullon’s materials are wrought with care: wood is custom-milled and meticulously stained; fabrics are hand-dyed and hand-sewn; often elements from older works are recombined into new sculptures that also incorporate found materials salvaged from an old cow barn in upstate New York. Recent work draws inspiration from the hallenhaus, the first barns in North America where living quarters for humans, livestock, and work animals were combined under one roof that also housed tools and food storage. At once visceral and beautiful, Foullon’s sculptures are unsentimental distillations of both the spaces and objects connected with these historical models.

For this exhibition, Foullon has responded to what she sees as similarities between the hallenhaus floor plan and that of the University Art Museum's open space interior. She has produced two new wall sculptures based on vintage patterns of a workman's bandana and a dickie collar, both of which are sewn and hand dyed by the artist; each gigantic sculpture will hang in separate 23-foot arches on the museum's second floor. Oscillating between comic abstractions and grand memorials these gargantuan "hangings" are examples of how Foullon imbues her humble source material with extraordinary properties. Using a palette of tarnished greens, sun baked yellows, sweaty grays, and bloodied pinks, Foullon taps into some of American history's most challenging and contested chapters such as the Westward Expansion, the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, drawing inspiration from the resilient and gritty determination of its participants. At the core of Foullon’s work lies the promise of a new brand of independent living wrested out of moments of struggle and freedom inherent in the artist’s studio practice.

Rachel Foullon was born in 1978 in Glendale, California. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Selected solo exhibitions include Ruminant Recombinant at ltd los angeles in Los Angeles, California (2012); An Accounting at ltd los angeles in Los Angeles, California (2010); and Grab a Root and Growl at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in New York City (2009). Selected group exhibitions include Double, double at Workplace Gallery in Gateshead, UK (2011); Group Show: 7 Sculptors at Brennan & Griffin in New York City (2011); Painting and Sculpture: To Benefit the Foundation for Contemporary Art at Lehman Maupin in New York City (2010); Curated Prints by Forth Estate at Frederieke Taylor Gallery in New York City (2010); On From Here at Guild & Greyshkul in New York City (2009); and Fresh Kills, Dumbo Arts Center, Brooklyn, New York (2008). Foullon received an M.F.A. degree from Columbia University, New York and a B.S. degree from New York University.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue with essays by Todd Alden and Elizabeth T. Smith.


The museum is grateful to the following for their support of the exhibition, catalogue, and programs: UAlbany Office of the President and the Office of the Provost, The University at Albany Foundation, University Auxiliary Services, and the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation. Additional funding for the Rachel Foullon: Braided Sun catalogue was provided by the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation. Additional funding for new works in the Rachel Foullon: Braided Sun exhibition was provided by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

This exhibition will be part of the MoHu Arts Festival, a 10 day-long arts festival throughout Albany, Schenectady, Rensselaer and Saratoga counties and beyond.

For more information, call (518) 442-4038

MUSEUM HOURS: Tuesday, 10am-8pm; Wednesday – Friday 10am-5pm;
Saturday, noon – 4pm.

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Media contact: Naomi Lewis, Exhibition & Outreach Coordinator, nlewis@albany.edu

 

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