ANDREW MOORE: DETROIT
November 5, 2009 - January 9, 2010 at Yancey Richardson Gallery
Yancey Richardson Gallery is pleased to present Detroit, the gallery!s fifth solo show by New York-based photographer Andrew Moore. The exhibition, the result of seven trips made to Detroit over the past two years, continues Moore's use of architecture as a way to explore themes of history, culture and time. As the artist states: “ My interests have always laid at the busy intersections of history, particularly at those locations where multiple tangents of time overlap and tangle… Detroit is more than a story of physical decline, decay and transformation; it is a city where the distortion of time is inventing new symbols for the America of the future.”
Moore's Detroit series will be the subject of a traveling solo exhibition in 2010, originating at the Akron Art Museum and accompanied by a monograph Detroit: Disassembled with an essay by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and Detroit native Philip Levine.
Several of the gallery exhibition's photographs are characterized by a hint of Surrealism, with things jarringly out of place or come alive. The ruined ornamental architecture of a former movie palace, the UA Theater, suggests the fantastic labyrinthine structures of Piranesi, an early influence on the Surrealists. In a photograph of what was once Henry Ford's elegant executive offices at the Model T headquarters, a carpeted floor ripples with an incongruous landscape of brilliant green moss. In an abandoned burned school Moore photographed a melted clock whose face bears the inscription National Time. The photograph serves as an ironic comment on the country!s economic debacle while referring directly to the melting clock in Salvador Dali's painting The Persistence of Memory. As Moore states, “Detroit is more than a story of physical decline, decay and transformation; it is a city where the distortion of time is inventing new symbols for the America of the future.”
Moore's previous projects include colonial and modernist Havana, the war damaged buildings of Sarajevo, post-Cold War Russia, the old theaters of New York's 42nd Street and the consumer-laden vertical landscape of the new Times Square.
Model T Headquarters, Detroit, Michigan, 2008
Palace Theater, Gary, Indiana, 2008
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