Debbie Grossman, My Pie Town "Jessie Evans-Whinery, homesteader, with her wife Edith Evans-Whinery and their baby." 2009-10, 10 1/2 x 14 inches
Tonight is the opening for friend and fellow SVA Alum, Debbie Grossman's project, My Pie Town. I really enjoyed her project when I first saw it at the MFA Thesis show. They popped up again at Pulse in Miami this past winter. I'm looking forward to seeing the collection of images together. The project does a good job of combining appropriated images with a seamless Photoshop collaging that results in a interesting new narrative. Also, in conjunction with the show the gallery has published a monograph of My Pie Town in an edition 100.
Statement: My Pie Town is a project by Debbie Grossman in which she reworks and re-imagines a body of images originally photographed by Russell Lee for the United States Farm Security Administration in 1940. Using Photoshop to modify Lee’s pictures, she created an imaginary, parallel world - a Pie Town populated exclusively by women. The images are revised in subtle ways, making the reading of them very complicated and compelling. The sixteen images in the series are both color and black and white, and are all based on Lee’s unpublished series on Pietown, a homesteaded community in New Mexico.
The original photographs are available either through the Library of Congress or through the Web. Grossman says of the project "I’ve begun to think of Photoshop as my medium – I’m fascinated by the fact this it shares qualities with both photography and drawing…..I enjoy imagining My Pie Town working as its own kind of (lighthearted) propaganda".
In conjunction with the show, the gallery is publishing a small monograph of My Pie Town in a limited edition 100 copies.
Debbie Grossman My Pie Town April 14-May 21, 2011 further information
For further information contact the gallery
Also opening at Julie Saul Gallery tonight:
Jeff Whetstone Seducing Birds, Snakes, Men April 14-May 21, 2011 further information