FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Artist Reception: Friday, September 7, 5PM – 7PM
on view September 7 – October 30, 2018
NOW (RECENT WORK), features a selection of new images from one of the most innovative photographers of the last half-century, Jerry Uelsmann. Renowned for his revolutionary multiple exposure printing technique, where multiple negatives and enlargers are employed in the darkroom and several images are fused to create a single photograph, Uelsmann’s images blend the familiar with the abstract to create surreal and dreamlike compositions. This selection of new photographs – all created in the last three years – shows the legendary artist continuing to push the boundaries of the photographic medium, as he has throughout the course of a long and illustrious career.
Although Uelsmann’s photographs have long been concerned with exploring the human condition, NOW (RECENT WORK) shows the artist delving deeper into himself. Images like the startlingly heartfelt Questions of Self provide an intimate and unguarded window into the psyche of an artist whose work has for decades left viewers pondering existential riddles within themselves. Many images in this exhibition (such as Memory Door, The Riddle of Now, and Self Doubt) are products of a creative and intellectual dialogue between Uelsmann and Swedish art history scholar Moa Petersén, a fruitful collaboration that yields some of the exhibition’s most evocative imagery. Exploring deeply human themes of loss, self-love, and transcendence, NOW (RECENT WORK) reveals an artist long renowned for his highly conceptual images embracing the personal. At 84 years old, Uelsmann’s creative fire burns hotter than ever, as he continues each day to re-examine both his art and himself.
NOW (RECENT WORK) is presented in conjunction with Confluence by Jerry Uelsmann at the LSU Museum of Art in Baton Rouge. Uelsmann will give a lecture at LSU Museum of Art on Thursday, September 6, 6pm.
Born in Detroit in 1934, Jerry Uelsmann received his B.F.A. degree at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1957 and his M.S. and M.F.A. at Indiana University in 1960. He taught photography at the University of Florida from 1964–1998. He is now retired from teaching, and currently resides in Gainesville, Florida. Uelsmann received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1972. His photographs have been exhibited in hundreds of exhibitions and are in the permanent collections of museums worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Chicago Art Institute, the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.