FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
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Peter Honig
Charlie Milgrim
Homeland
Mercury 20 Gallery
25 Grand Ave. (at Broadway)
Oakland CA 94612
April 4 – April 26 2008
Opening Reception: Friday April 4th from 6:00 – 9:00pm (in conjunction with First Friday/Oakland Art Murmur).
Peter Honig and Charlie Milgrim open an exhibition of new work at Mercury 20 Gallery on April 4th with a reception for the artists from 6:00 – 9:00pm.
East Bay artist Charlie Milgrim’s first exhibit for Mercury 20 Gallery investigates a conception of the Homeland as an emotional state both defined and degraded by fear insecurity and complacency.
Milgrim employs a vocabulary of discarded materials such as old bowling balls and rusted wagons to create installations in which natural forces such as gravity and oxidation serve as conceptual metaphors for political and social decay.
Skillfully re-purposing objects for her assemblages the artist’s delicately balanced compositions seem to harbor a quirky and dark half-life where creation and demise are one. Milgrim’s work imagines a future at the intersection of art science and fate.
Charlie Milgrim was born in New York City. She received a BFA from California College of the Arts and an MFA from UC Berkeley. She has exhibited her work at the Oakland Museum OK Harris in New York City Haines Gallery and Gallery 16 in San Francisco Works Gallery in San Jose and has work in many private collections including the Di Rosa Preserve in Napa CA. Her studio is in Berkeley next to the railroad tracks.
Berkeley artist Peter Honig presents "The Architecture of Love" a series of photographic studies inspired by the love between German conceptual photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher.
Honig’s large scale studio photographs of abstracted models of water towers explore his fascination with the couple’s half-century romantic collaboration imaging and archiving water towers. Using found objects such as pipes cans and other industrial detritus to form crudely crafted minimalist sculptural forms Honig self-consciously flirts with the Becher’s concept of Anonyme Skulpturen (anonymous sculptures).
In (re)viewing the Becher’s iconic subject matter in his studio through the rose-colored lens of love Honig distills the photographers’ relationship to one another and their subject matter into a single fluid space presenting the viewer with an unlikely muse in the form of hulking deserted and rusting water towers haunting barren landscapes.
Fusing the genres of still-life architectural landscape and portrait photography Honig’s series presents a unique vision of the concept of Homeland… one viewed nostalgically through the rear-view mirror of a lover’s car equal parts oasis and mirage homage and parody reservoir and empty vessel.
Peter Honig artist professional photographer and art educator was born in Boston MA and attained his BA in Photography at Hampshire College. He has been living and working in Berkeley California since 1991.