Justine Kurland "This Train is Bound for Glory"
Mitchell-Innes & Nash (534 W 26th St.)
This event has ended.
Mitchell-Innes & Nash presents Justine Kurland: This Train is Bound for Glory from October 15 – November 14. The exhibition will be the gallery's second solo show of Kurland's work. It coincides with the publication of a book by the same title, published by Ecstatic Peace Library in New York.
In this series, photographed over two years of travel, Kurland focuses on the distinct, nomadic subculture of the hobo. Her images of trains, train-hoppers, and the American West allude to a hobo mythology developed in folk songs and literature. Kurland's method combines a documentary process with romantic idealism, giving her images a naturalism inflected by utopian fantasy.
Kurland's work draws upon the nineteenth-century landscape tradition of depicting a perfect place. Her photographs are narratives gleaned from America's dream of itself: a collective identity based on a firm faith in manifest destiny. These images are portals into the not-quite-real, not-quite-fictional realm of the American frontier. Kurland is a longstanding traveler, wanderer, and seeker in her own right, whose itinerant lifestyle intersects with and informs her work.
[Image: Justine Kurland "Donner Pass" (2008) C-print, 50 x 40 in.]
Media
Schedule
from October 15, 2009 to November 14, 2009