Gus Powell “The Lonely Ones”
Sasha Wolf Gallery
This event has ended.
Inspired by the great cartoonist William Steig and his classic book from 1942, The Lonely Ones (which pairs Steig’s line-drawn characters with simple one-liners of dialogue), Gus Powell made his own version of “The Lonely Ones” (J&L Books) featuring captioned color photographs inhabited by people, animals and inanimate characters.
In Powell’s first solo exhibition at Sasha Wolf Gallery, The Lonely Ones is presented as an installation of color photographs and letterpress text. Powell, who is best known for his poetic and kinetic street pictures, and for the humorous images he has made for The New Yorker, brings the same sensibility and vision to this exhibition. Gracefully moving from humor to beauty to pathos, these images and their one-liners cumulatively build into a powerful visual and emotional experience, both playful and profound.
Gus Powell was born in New York City in 1974 and attended Oberlin College where he majored in comparative religion. In 2003 he was selected to be in PDNs 30 under 30 issue and also published his first monograph, The Company of Strangers (J&L Books). His work has been exhibited internationally, including a solo show at The Museum of The City of New York and group exhibitions at The Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts Houston and FOAM, NL.
His photographs have been published in Aperture, Harpers, Vogue, M le mag - Le Monde, Wired, Fortune and W, and he has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine for a decade. He is a member of the street photographers’ collective In-Public and is faculty in the MFA Photography, Video and Related Media Department at the School of Visual Arts, NY.
His work is included in the books Bystander: A World History of Street Photography and Street Photography Now. Powell’s second monograph, The Lonely Ones (J&L Books 2015), was inspired by the work of William Steig and is a return to his earlier practice of using image and text together.
Media
Schedule
from January 13, 2016 to February 27, 2016
Opening Reception on 2016-01-13 from 18:00 to 20:00