Murray Guy has announced its participation in Frieze New York (Booth B5), where the gallery will present a seminal group of early photographs by Zoe Leonard.
Shot between 1994 and 1997 while Leonard was living in an extremely remote part of Alaska, these six works show animals that the artist hunted and butchered herself and with friends: a bear, a moose, a beaver, and a duck. Astonishingly anti-picturesque, they are key works in Leonard's long exploration of the relationships between photography and images of nature.
As the artist explains: "In 1994, I started spending time in Alaska. The first time, I stayed six months. I returned in 1995 and lived up there alone for a year and a half in Eagle, a small village on the Yukon River. I got interested in the idea of subsistence - of living more directly from my own labor. I heated with wood, hauled my own water, and gathered and grew some of my food. Gradually, my experiences there seeped into my work.
"I was afraid at first that I would have a hard time making art in Alaska. What I found was the opposite. I was surrounded by the complexity of nature, and I began thinking about our "progress" as a people, about the choices we have made. I thought a lot about hunting, about our predatory nature. No one wants to admit they're a predator, but it's impossible to find someone who doesn't sanction killing on some level - for food, or for political or moral reasons. Somehow we no longer really view ourselves as part of the food chain. What we eat is prepackaged and delivered to us. Our shit disappears when we flush the toilet.
"In Alaska, I began to understand what it is to haul your own water. I felt like I understood economics and economy for the first time, the relationship of my labor to my comfort. My labor to my survival. I had to haul this many gallons of water to put this much water in my body, and I had to hunt this animal and skin it to feed my body. "
More information and images
HERE.
Alongside this group of photographs, we will present new sculptural and sound works by Sergei Tcherepnin, who will be featured in the upcoming Venice Biennale, as well as the forthcoming exhibition Soundings, which opens August 1 at The Museum of Modern Art. Read more on Tcherepnin's work, including a review of his recent show in current issue of Artforum, and an interview in the current issue of Mousse.
Image: Zoe Leonard, Bear Paw Hanging, 1996/1998, Silver gelatin print, 24 x 17 in / 61 x 43 cm
