DNJ Gallery is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition, Signs of the Times, featuring panoramic photographs by Richard Gilles. Gallery II presents Laundry Lines by Bernadette DiPietro. Both exhibits form a subtle, political commentary on our precarious economic times and the natural environment.

Richard Gilles generates his title from the outdoor advertising trade publication by the same name, Signs of the Times. His large-scale, panoramic, color photographs document the proliferation of empty billboards along America’s highways. In these photographs, Gilles’ subjects are the monolithic and sculptural behemoths that dot the interstate. The billboards are larger-than-life symbols of American consumerism that lie bare and abandoned along America’s roadways. These literal “blank slates” --devoid of glitzy images and the usual symbols of consumption, temptation, leisure and desire --can be filled in mentally by the viewer. Gilles’s photographs astutely reveal both the unraveling of the American economy and an optimistic appreciation for the simplicity of the minimalist object.

Gilles received a B.A. from San Francisco State University.  An ongoing theme of his work is to bring to the forefront things that are seen but not noticed. By isolating everyday objects, such as billboards, Gilles encourages the viewer to take a more active role in his claim about visual culture. He has exhibited in galleries throughout the United States and has won numerous awards for his work. This will be his second solo exhibition at DNJ.

When Bernadette DiPietro was eleven years old, she began photographing the clothes hanging out to dry as she went about her daily chores. The colors, textures, smells, movements, and shapes of the strung up objects sparked a lifelong passion for both photography and the colorful clotheslines that she affectionately calls “the flags of nations.” DiPietro has travelled the world and captured cultural similarities and differences through the shared experience of hanging laundry-- an age-old household ritual. Her images reflect the rhythm, order, and whimsy of a flowered sheet twisting and snapping in the breeze. With great attention to composition, DiPietro’s considers her Laundry Lines to be “my pictures that I paint against the sky forming instinctive, moving sculptures.”

Please contact the gallery for more information or images.

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