Search Results for: diana kingsley

Congratulations to Diana Kingsley for this New Yorker write-up of her show at Castelli:

It’s hard to know what Kingsley is up to with this new group of photographs, but she’s obviously having fun. Some of her still-life images look like parodies of Elad Lassry’s, with similarly oddball arrangements of tomatoes, cheese wedges, and melons and balloons on brightly colored backdrops. Roe Etheridge [sic] might have shot the ikebana-style flower arrangement with a partly eaten foil-wrapped candy bar left at its base. But Kingsley’s off on her own wonderfully weird trip with much of this work, including a picture of a forest floor with little stacks of coins among the pine needles. Through Aug. 3.

Of course Kingsley was doing this before Roe Ethridge but it's not unfavorable company.

Some earlier writing on Kingsley:

here

and here.

Diana Kingsley has a show of new work opening Friday night at Leo Castelli gallery [ArtCal listing]:

Leo Castelli Gallery is pleased to present In Pari Delicto, an exhibition of new photographs by Diana Kingsley, her third solo show at the gallery. Kingsley, continuing to mine the terrain of the slight incident and the small indignity, has ratcheted up a sense of the absurd while maintaining the cool formalism and deadpan humor of her previous work.

The exhibition’s title, In Pari Delicto, a somewhat archaic legal term meaning “in equal fault,” connotes an elegance and charged sensuality belying the prosaic resignation of the phrase's meaning. Dress gloves, cigarettes, sterling silver sets, antiques, and thoroughbreds anachronistically symbolize sophistication, while barely disguising a standoff between ordinary, commensurable forces: incumbent and invading, animated and inert, covetous and restrained. In the slow unfolding of non-events each side acts in balletic concert; no side is privileged.

In “Delicate Beast” a tangle of unruly dried branch arrangements impossibly grows into a silver chalice as a live praying mantis materializes under the tangle, creepily mocking its own cartoon depiction on the background wallpaper. In “Bad Seed” the busywork of an unseen miscreant defaces the back of an antique chair with a spray of equestrian stickers. In “Night Ramble” a hand in an ill-fitting glove confronts a succulent gardenia in a mysterious stalemate as a cigarette in the gloved fingers languishes, ready to drop ash on the mitt's clean whiteness.

Though the images are strikingly lush, there is something discomfiting about their deliberate, almost defiant prettiness. Kingsley’s precise compositional rigor even hints at an inherent inanity in such photographic strategies. It is the unexpected contradictions and tensions in both form and subject matter that give the work its mischievous wit and power.

previous posts about Kingsley: "Get Those Breasts Out of the Lobby, Theyre Offending Women" and several from my digital media tree blog. I've been a fan of the artist's work since first seeing it in Soho around 1997, and look forward to this show.

Diana Kingsley, Blue Ribbon, 2005, 42" x 40", lambda print

The artwork above, by Diana Kingsley, was recently removed from a curated show in a building at 55 5th Avenue in NYC (at 13th Street). The property is owned by arts patron Francis Greenburger, founder of Art Omi, an artist's colony in upstate New York. Greenburger employs a full time curator, Elisabeth Akkerman, to install art in buildings he owns around the city and country. And not just install--the above work appeared in a two person exhibition called "Blue Ribbon," which is the name of Kingsley's piece--clearly her work was an important element in the show. The other artist, Kate Gilmore, shows with Smith-Stewart gallery; Kingsley is a Bellwether alum who has been showing at Leo Castelli.

Why was the work removed? Besides housing the headquarters of Greenburger's company, Time Equities, Inc., the building on 5th has a medical office where women come to get mammograms. According to Kingsley, the curator told her that a complaint had been made because someone felt it was inappropriate to see full breasts on display--in a sweater!--in a place where women were possibly getting bad news about cancer.

That's it. That's all it takes, and the artwork is gone. This wryly humorous and rather gorgeous image, with an awkwardly placed brooch mirroring a cheesy floral award in a play of irrational, cantilevered symmetry, will not be seen. And an arts patron does nothing to stop the suppression.

This is pure speculation, but I wonder if it was actually men who were disturbed by the image and the traumatized cancer screeners just a politically correct excuse to get rid of it. Corporate lobbies are dull unsexed places and this decorum is ironclad.