Within the frame of the 3rd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary art, GMG Gallery is pleased to present a special project "Thomas Joshua Cooper and Bill Fontana". This project will comprise of exhibitions by two outstanding American artists - "True" by Thomas Joshua Cooper and "Silent Echoes" by Bill Fontana.
Charting a two year journey to the polar regions of the Atlantic basin, the exhibition True, from renowned international photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper, presents new works from the series, The World's Edge - an ongoing work that seeks to map the extremities of the land and islands that surround the Atlantic Ocean.
For the past 30 years, the artist has travelled to some of the most isolated and far-flung locations across the globe, making images with his 19th century Agfa camera and specially made photographic plates.
The World's Edge was initiated in 1990. Each work begins as a location found on a map, researched and tracked down, and after often difficult journeys by air, sea and land, only one photograph is made per location on Cooper's arrival. The World's Edge began with trips to chart Europe and Africa, and the last outstanding journey along the Atlantic coast of North America from Labrador through to Cape Cod and on to Key Largo is planned for spring 2010.
The works in this exhibition include images made in the North and South poles, at the northern most land points of Norway and Greenland, and the most northerly point of the Antarctic Peninsula, Prime Head, which has had fewer human visitors than the Moon.
The exhibition True required some of the toughest journeys for Cooper to date: over three months at sea, sailing into areas marked as 'uncharted dangers' - territories where rescue teams never venture and in which insurance companies are not able to provide cover - and treacherous weather conditions, including extreme storms caused by the El Niño and being snowed into the South Pole for 13 consecutive days.
Constructed only and always of the landscape, Cooper's images are devoid not only of figures and animals, but all human trace. Using the chiaroscuro technique - the use of long exposures and low lighting to create distinct areas of light and darkness - the resulting images describe the darkness of cold water, white voids of fog, submerged rocks icebergs and the geology of rocks.
Bill Fontana is an internationally known artist, pioneering experiments in sound. For the past 30 years he has been creating installations that use sound as a sculptural medium to interact with and transform our perceptions of visual and architectural settings. Influenced by John Cage's idea that 'music is continuous and listening is intermittent' Fontana encourages us to hear the most silent and unmusical things. In Silent Echoes Fontana has used modern measurement technology to reveal a hidden world of perpetual acoustic energy within an apparently dormant bell. The bell is always listening and is a physical meditation on the world around it. These bells are portals to the acoustic energy around them and they have never been silent.
This idea of music being a state of mind tuned into the music going on all the time around us has been a strong interest in all of Fontana's work. "These temple bells are a physical analogy to the idea of music as continuous listening", - Fontana says.
Bill Fontana was born in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. He lives and works in San Francisco. He graduated from The Institute of Music in Cleveland (1970) and received a Bachelor's degree in The New School for Social Research in New York (1970). His experimental sound installations have been exhibited around the world in major museums, biennials and public spaces and include: Speeds of Time, Tate Britain, London, 2008; Pigeon Soundings, Kolumba Museum, Cologne, Germany, 2007; Harmonic Bridge, Tate Modern, London, 2006; Acoustical Visions of Venice, 48th Venice Biennale, 1999.
Thomas Joshua Cooper, born 1949 in San Francisco, has lived in Scotland for nearly thirty years, where he is Professor of Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art. During this time he has founded the only fine art photography course in the UK.
Cooper has held over ninety solo exhibitions since 1971 across Europe and America, including in 2001, an exhibition at Tate St. Ives, followed by exhibitions in 2005 at the Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester, and Casa das Mudas Centro das Artes, Madeira and more recently, an exhibition at Haunch of Venison, London.
His work can be found in public and private collections around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Tate collection; the Scottish National Galleries and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.