Overview
During 1997 and 1998, Bartscherer travelled the canal which stretches between Liverpool and Leeds in the transpennine region of Northern England. Built in the late 18th and 19th centuries, this canal provides the focus for Bartscherer's work, which examines the natural topography of the transpennine region and the industrial culture whose growth and decline has, to a great extent, determined its present day look. Bartscherer's large color photographs take as their subject the canal and its supporting architecture, bridges, walls, warehouses and sheds, the countryside and towns defined by its presence. The pictures stress the delicacy of what happens to be here, visible now, and the inherent instability of the relationship between natural and cultural landscapes over time. Wildness and domesticity, resilience, fragility, stillness, progress and entropy are among the themes that inform Canal, as they did Bartscherer's previous exhibition projects, Nevada, and Pioneering Mattawa, shown at Marian Goodman Gallery in 1997 and 1995.
Canal was originally commissioned for artranspennine98, a project of the Tate Gallery and Henry Moore Sculpture Trust, produced with the support of the Public Art Development Trust. Its exhibition at artranspennine98 was realized in two parts. The first part consisted of ten large-scale photographs exhibited in an 1830s railway warehouse which is now part of Manchester's Museum of Science and Industry; in the 19th Century landscape collection of the Leeds City Art Gallery; and at the Mash & Air Bar in Manchester. In the second part of the work, eighteen photographs were published as a sequence of 18 postcards and mailed to a group of a thousand people, one image at a time, every few days, over the course of the fourteen-week exhibition.
Joseph Bartscherer
Canal
Marian Goodman Gallery is pleased to announce Canal, an exhibition of new works by Joseph Bartscherer, opening in the South Gallery on February 26, 1999 and continuing until April 3.
During 1997 and 1998, Bartscherer travelled the canal which stretches between Liverpool and Leeds in the transpennine region of Northern England. Built in the late 18th and 19th centuries, this canal provides the focus for Bartscherer's work, which examines the natural topography of the transpennine region and the industrial culture whose growth and decline has, to a great extent, determined its present day look. Bartscherer's large color photographs take as their subject the canal and its supporting architecture, bridges, walls, warehouses and sheds, the countryside and towns defined by its presence. The pictures stress the delicacy of what happens to be here, visible now, and the inherent instability of the relationship between natural and cultural landscapes over time. Wildness and domesticity, resilience, fragility, stillness, progress and entropy are among the themes that inform Canal, as they did Bartscherer's previous exhibition projects, Nevada, and Pioneering Mattawa, shown at Marian Goodman Gallery in 1997 and 1995.
Canal was originally commissioned for artranspennine98, a project of the Tate Gallery and Henry Moore Sculpture Trust, produced with the support of the Public Art Development Trust. Its exhibition at artranspennine98 was realized in two parts. The first part consisted of ten large-scale photographs exhibited in an 1830s railway warehouse which is now part of Manchester's Museum of Science and Industry; in the 19th Century landscape collection of the Leeds City Art Gallery; and at the Mash & Air Bar in Manchester. In the second part of the work, eighteen photographs were published as a sequence of 18 postcards and mailed to a group of a thousand people, one image at a time, every few days, over the course of the fourteen-week exhibition.
Joseph Bartscherer has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts grants. His works have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Yale University Gallery and the Photographer's Gallery in London. This is his third solo exhibition at the Marian Goodman Gallery.
