DNJ Gallery is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition, “Alchemical Feedback,” featuring new photographs by San Francisco-based artist Suzy Poling. This show includes work from her two ongoing projects: “Geysers” and “Ellipses.” Poling aptly chooses to unite these two bodies of photographic works because they further her ongoing investigation into the process of decay, regeneration, chemical reactions and the spontaneity of the Earth’s natural development.

In her first solo-exhibition in Los Angeles, Suzy Poling’s abstract photographs depict a contrast between the human-made with the forces of nature, using an almost absurd, but beautiful palette. In her series titled “Geysers,” she photographs the bubbling and mysteriously vibrant magma at Yellowstone National Park. Poling’s “Geysers” depict a natural phenomenon with strange, opposing colors. The minimalistic images of the “Geysers” mimic the nonrepresentational, nonfigurative forms created in “Ellipses”- her series of experimental photographs that utilize chemistry, oils, and burned photographic film. The images in “Ellipse’s” are as spontaneous and as unexpected as the mysterious geysers. Both series explore the ordered chaos and alchemy inherent in nature’s volatile and
reactive processes.

Poling received a B.A. from Columbia College, Chicago. She has exhibited in galleries and museums internationally including the California College of Arts, San Francisco, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, Machine Projects, Los Angeles and the Australian Center for Photography, Sydney. Her work is included in numerous private collections and her awards include artist residencies at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE, and the Bay Area’s Southern Exposure.

In Gallery II, Cynthia Greig presents her body of photographs titled, “Representations,” exploring the
concept of photographic truth and its correspondence to perceived reality. As a kind of playful homage to William Henry Fox Talbot’s treatise, The Pencil of Nature, this series combines color photography, painting and drawing to create what the artist calls “photographic documents of three-dimensional drawings.” Everyday objects such as radios, telephones, coffee cups, and high-heeled shoes are whitewashed, outlined in charcoal pencil, and staged for the camera as deliberately as an old master trompe l'oeil. Remnants of the objects’ original colors peek through the paint, and some areas are left bare for the photograph. Greig’s whimsical works playfully teeter between drawing, painting, sculpture, and photography; she invites the viewer to consider photographic illusion and the true nature of
the subject and the object.

Cynthia Greig lives and works in metropolitan Detroit. Since 1990, she has been making work that explores the exchange of influence between perception and experience, and the photograph’s unique role in negotiating what we consider to be real or true. Her work been exhibited in museums and galleries both in the US and abroad including the Camera Club, NY, San Francisco Camerawork, Houston Center for Photography, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Toronto, and many others.

EXHIBITION: Suzy Poling: Alchemical Feedback
Gallery II: Cynthia Greig: Representations
SHOW DATES: May 8, 2010 – July 10, 2010
RECEPTION: Saturday, May 8, 6-8 pm
GALLERY HOURS: Tuesday - Saturday 10-6

www.dnjgallery.net