Joergen Geerds "The Other Side"
532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel
This event has ended.
Through panoramic photographs, artist Joergen Geerds explores the interconnections of space and community, humans and habitats, inside and out, self and other.
Geerds highlights here not a dissociating modern city, but its underlying structures and spaces, which—temporarily freed of people by the power of the camera—allow for unity, for community. Geerds’s alchemy shows us that the city is not so much a succession of insides and outsides as it is a plastic network of other sides. If anything, he empties New York of its value as a site of exchange.
He flattens the New York of capital (snowy parks, busy restaurants, bright streets) with the New York of snow and streets. This attention to the elemental is what makes Geerds’s images so arresting: Are these photographs dark comments on a New York underneath, around, and above us all the time, hiding from us, shaping our lives?
Or are they agnostic, or even stoic works—intended to ask us questions about our city, yes, but also intended to question the spaces themselves, to bring them, in answering, into concert with one another, in the not-quite-dark of the long-exposure night?
In this critique of city spaces, Geerds’s photography recalls the maximal, place-focused interrogation of industry practiced by Allan Sekula and Noël Burch in TheForgotten Space. But—odd for a New York artist—Geerds does not bring a politics of exchange into his work.
Regardless of how we interpret or are questioned by Geerds’s many-sided New York, we can’t help but look at it, and look again.
Joergen Geerds was born in Oberstreu, Germany, in 1969. He studied photography and design under Ernst Weckert and Nicolai Sarafov at the University for Applied Science, Würzburg. Since 2000 he has resided in in Astoria, New York. Inspired by the grandeur and grime of New York City, Geerds branched into panoramic photography in 2006 after a successful career as an art director in the advertising world.
Over the years, Geerds has continually refined his love of wide-angle photography. Finding the uncropped cityscapes revealed by his flattened photographs to be unique in the market, Geerds was led to develop his own distinct style—large-scale, hyper-wide night panoramas of New York City.
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Schedule
from January 26, 2012 to February 25, 2012
Opening Reception on 2012-01-26 from 18:00 to 20:30