Sergio Purtell “In Brooklyn: Architectures of Disappearance”

ART 3

poster for Sergio Purtell “In Brooklyn: Architectures of Disappearance”

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ART 3 presents an exhibition of photographs by SERGIO PURTELL “In Brooklyn: Architectures of Disappearance.”

In Brooklyn: Architectures of Disappearance forms only a part of the artist’s greater project Real. Mingling an almost de Chirico-esque sense of place with a documentarian’s eye for detail, Purtell’s photographs evidence an ever-changing cityscape in the process of its own disappearance. The works selected for exhibition were taken in Bushwick, Williamsburg, and Gowanus, and hauntingly portray structures and landmarks already repurposed or removed, such as the 1882 Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, the once-prominent Kentile Floors sign in Gowanus, and the former Bushwick warehouse now occupied by the Luhring Augustine Gallery.

Begun in 2008, the project as a whole strikingly reveals rapid socio-economic changes throughout the US, taking for its subject-matter regions whose gentrified social and architectural landscapes fragment into the unfamiliar, creating an emotional climate of stark estrangement. Encompassing Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, as well as parts of New England and eastern regions of the States, ART 3’s curators have chosen to focus on the parts of Real that relate to Brooklyn. These black-and-white photographs document an invisible telos underlying the surface materiality of the spaces pictured.

Purtell traces the outlines of revenant human actions through Brooklyn’s empty streets, underscoring the strangeness of local businesses bereft of commerce, graffiti seemingly relegated to a proscribed space, and makeshift hovels where the homeless can shelter for warmth. Figures rarely make an appearance in these photos, only occasionally will two people eerily drift by canoe through the Gowanus channel, or a young man in wedding attire destroy his own car. Meanwhile, the same place and time yields a dark-haired woman searching through a portable greenhouse.
Populated or not, these images are all the more alluring because they document ordinary actions that have become momentous in light of the changes Brooklyn has since undergone.

In the words of Purtell: “This photographic project is large in scope. I want it to be dense, to create a visual catalog of current America through a journey. It is in the course of a journey that one looks to the landscape for traces, metaphors and the visual facts of this life”.
Purtell’s sensitivity toward people and landscapes was developed during his childhood travels across Chile, which comprised the busy streets of Santiago as well as the lonely expanses of the PanAmerican Highway into Patagonia. Among his most important influences, he credits the obsessive narratives of Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, and the photographer Tod Papageorge who was his university mentor at Yale.
- Jeffrey Grunthaner

SERGIO PURTELL, American, b. 1955 in Santiago, Chile, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He moved from his native Santiago de Chile to the US in 1973, after Pinochet’s coup. He received his BFA in photography from RISD. After teaching photography in New Haven he moved to New York City in the mid-1980’s. As a fine art photographer Purtell has exhibited worldwide, with most interest in his work in Europe. His works from this period are in many public and private collections in USA, Germany Japan, France, Italy, Holland, Spain, Belgium, Chile and Panama. In the 1990s he turned to commercial photography and worked for design studios, prestigious magazines and publishers. Purtell went on to pursue his love of fine art printing and in 1996 opened print studio Black and White on White, specializing in exhibitions and books for distinguished fine art photographers (his first job was for the Walker Evans estate). The studio is now located in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where he continues his collaboration with many major artists, estates, museums, and galleries, and again works on his own fine art photography.

Media

Schedule

from April 08, 2015 to May 17, 2015

Artist(s)

Sergio Purtell

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