Jessica Dimmock: The Ninth Floor
April 17 - May 31, 2008
Press Release
Foley Gallery is pleased to announce the first New York exhibition of photojournalist Jessica Dimmock.
Jessica Dimmock began photographing her series "The Ninth Floor" after being approached by a New York City drug dealer several years ago. She was in the midst of completing her degree at the International Center of Photography for Documentary Photography and Photojournalism. She became interested in photographing the dealer and his daily deliveries. One such stop was the ninth-floor of an elegant apartment building in New York's Flatiron district. For the next two and a half years Dimmock settled in as a long-term observer to candidly record the consumptive and consumed lives of nearly thirty heroin addicts in heir eroding, claustrophobic home.
"...the mood inside was muffled, slow, secretive and sick, becalmed by a septic hush," Dimmock recalls, and though her vivid portrait of that decaying place, with no light and duct-taped walls indeed silences its voyeur, it is her relentless documentation of the human lives struggling through and surviving addiction that impact upon us so profoundly.
Caught between the unaffected, objective nature of journalism and the heart-felt feelings for her subjects, Dimmock reflects how, "...the strange contradictions of this work are such that a mutual trust is built...but that very trust eventually undermines the arms-length neutrality of the documentarian."
A selection of more than forty chromogenic prints from Dimmock's series will be exhibited. The photographs lay bare the privacy and unmentionables of this three-bedroom apartment; its afflicted tenants silhouetting through smoke-clouds, wading in piles of waste, lampshades, bottles, cardboard boxes, and needles.
Jessica Dimmock is a graduate of The International Center of Photography. Her work has appeared in Aperture, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, Time, Fortune, New York Magazine and Fader. She received the F award for Concerned Photography from Forma and Fabrica, the Inge Morath Award from Magnum, the Marty Forsher Fellowship for Documentary Photography from PDN and the Juror's Choice Award for the Project Competition from the Santa Fe Center for Photography. In the winter of 2008 Jessica became a member of the VII Network, a division of the VII Photo agency. Jessica lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Chris Scarborough: WarbabiesApril 17 - May 31, 2008
Press Release
Foley Gallery is pleased to annouce the first New York solo exhibition of artist Chris Scarborough.
In this recent rendering of graphite drawings, Chris Scarborough acutely examines his generation's attraction to, and his own personal fascination with the icons of eastern popular culture.
Scarborough first encountered these foreign idols as an adolescent growing up in southern United States, in the Japanese anime, Akira. The artist marks this introduction as significant to his visual lexicon, as the film's bizarre and unfamiliar imagery impressed deeply upon him with its strength of both magnetism and repellence.
The series "Warbabies" centers on a theme of cartoon violence, through the graphic employment of anthropomorphization: the idea of endowing non-human entities such as weather or weaponry, with human attributes. In the Japanese religion Shinto, there is a parallel belief in kami: a spirit or deity that inhabits both animate and inanimate objects. Scarborough sets these localized notions side-by-side to observe both how they are defined and how they cross, in culture, in context, and in narrative.
Working with idealized images from the east and western pop-cultures, Scarborough plucks his subjects out of their familiar, stable surroundings and thrusts them into the newness of one another. He tangles silky hair, airplanes and missiles up in the tentacles of a Jungian dream, and perfectly renders each smile on the faces of his Japanese beauties until they sour with ignorance, turn grotesque and inappropriate.
Chris Scarborough graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design. His work has been included in Alarm, ArtPapers and NY Arts Magazine, and in New American Paintings. He has exhibited solo at Gescheidle in Chicago, IL, Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta, GA, and has participated in group exhibitions in NYC, Chicago, LA, Washington D.C., Miami, Atlanta, and New Orleans. Scarborough's work is part of the Tennessee State Museum, 21C Museum, and the Tullman collections. He is a recipient of the 2008 Artist Fellowship for the state of Tennessee. Scarborough presently lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee.
Gallery Hours:Tuesday - Saturday, 11am - 6pm