The Sheldon Gallery Presents Large-Scale Photographs By Jay Wolke 6/4 - 9/4

The Sheldon Art Galleries presents Jay Wolke: Architecture of Resignation, June 4 - September 4, 2010 in the Gallery of Photography and the Bernoudy Gallery of Architecture. Please join us for an opening reception on Friday, June 4 from 5 - 7 p.m.! Also opening on June 4: Scott Raffe: Circus Flora; Erik Spehn: Tape Drawings and Wallace HernDon Smith Paintings. Gallery Hours are Tuesdays, Noon - 8 p.m.; Wednesdays - Fridays, Noon - 5 p.m.; Saturdays, 10 a.m. - 2 p.m. and one hour prior to Sheldon performances and during intermission. Admission is free. For more information on the exhibition visit the galleries' website at www.thesheldon.org/galleries.asp. The exhibition is made possible by Joan and Mitchell Markow.

Gallery Talk: Jay Wolke, Saturday, June 5, 11 a.m., Gallery of Photography, admission free.

Since 1999, Jay Wolke has been photographing in the south of Italy . During these visits, Wolke has captured the complexity of a landscape called the Mezzogiorno. What he found in this storied landscape is an elaborate set of physical, social and political structures, manifesting in an extraordinary folding together of visual information. On one level, the images he has created are referential and documentary-but on another level, they are about what cannot be explicitly seen, what is hidden and implied. Wolke's color photographs convey purposeful neutrality; constructions of selected non-fictions resonating between historical and contemporary meaning. The larger narratives of the marks made, marks abandoned, and marks erased, represent numerous conquerors and occupiers, from the Greeks to the Spanish to the Camorra. The subsequent adaptations and resignations of those subject to this dominance are evident, and represent a major portion of his photographic attention. Often, architecture and technology have only been used as political smoke screens, hiding the much greater exchanges of power. With great promises of progress, the land has been exploited and parceled out for the convenience of a few and accepted with resignation and submission by the many.

The 40 large-scale color photographs in the exhibition expose the rise and fall of various colonial, political and commercial powers, as well as the inspired, but often faltering, inventions of ambitious individuals. The images are not meant to edify or memorialize. Some of the subjects aspire to greatness, while others convey an uncanny indifference to their own fate. Some of the artifacts examined are more sculptural than architectural, in that they were never utilitarian, and at present, communicate a sense of pervasive anachronism. The images represent the lack of integrity of the systems being photographed, yet we view them through lenses enhanced by the timeless belief in the bel paese-the beautiful country-even as this place is foiled by layers of dysfunction and greed.

Jay Wolke was born in 1954 and raised in Chicago , IL . He received his B.F.A. in Printmaking and Illustration/Design at Washington University , St. Louis , and an M.S. in Photography at the Institute of Design , Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago . Since 1981 he has taught photography and art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Institute of Design / IIT, Studio Art Centers International/ Florence , Italy , and Columbia College Chicago. He is an Associate Professor at Columbia College , Chicago and served as Chair of the Art and Design Department from 2000 to 2005, and again resumed his duties as Chair in 2008. Wolke has had solo exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, the St. Louis Art Museum , Harvard University , the California Museum of Photography, and Foundation Studio Marangoni, Florence . His photographs are in the permanent print collections of the Museum of Modern Art New York , the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and the San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. Two monographs of his work have been published: All Around the House: Photographs of American-Jewish Communal Life (Art Institute of Chicago, 1998) and Along the Divide: Photographs of the Dan Ryan Expressway (Center for American Places, 2004). Wolke has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, Focus Infinity Fund and the Ruttenberg Arts Foundation. His photographs have appeared in numerous publications including, the New York Times Magazine, Doubletake, Architectural Record, Newsweek, Fortune, and the Village Voice. The book, Architecture of Resignation will be released later this year.

The not-for-profit Sheldon Art Galleries exhibits works by local, national, and International Artists in all media. Over 6,000 square feet of the galleries' spaces on the 2nd floor are permanently devoted to rotating exhibits of photography, architecture, jazz art and history, and children's art. A sculpture garden, seen from both the atrium lobby and the connecting glass bridge, features periodic rotations and installations, and the Nancy Spirtas Kranzberg Gallery on the lower level features art of all media. The Sheldon actively supports the work of St. Louis artists in all mediums and features a dedicated Gallery with museum-quality exhibits by St. Louis artists, past and present.

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