Maximum Security: New York Landscapes
September 12th through October 19th, 2002
Opening reception: Thursday, September 12th, 6 to 8 p.m.
Debs & Co. is excited to start the 2002 season with an exhibition of work by California painter Sandow Birk. Mr. Birk's new paintings romance the forms and politic of the Hudson River School in their depiction of the sites of New York State's maximum security prisons. In referencing the heavies of Luminism while illustrating the Empire State's imperial[ist] prison system, the paintings are specific social critique and temporally disrupted dystopic pastorales.
In these landscapes, both the prisons and the inmates of New York State are nearly hidden from view. In certain works, such as Bedford Hills Correctional Facility -- Bedford Hills, New York, Mr. Birk refers to specific paintings from the past, showing unpeopled landscapes that once signalled Transcendentalist spiritual liberation and progressive democratics as now concealing places of hierarchic confinement and restraint. There is true irony in Mr. Birk's use of this lily-white vocabulary. Since 1989, there have been more black Americans entering the New York State prison system for drug offenses each year than there have been graduated from the State University of New York with undergraduate, masters and doctoral degrees combined. The number of whites entering New York prisons for drug offenses has increased 107% from 1980 to 1997, while there has been a 1,311% increase in the number of blacks committed for drug offenses. In 1980, roughly the same number of blacks as whites were being sent to prison for drug offenses.
Mr. Birk is well known in California for his series Historical Works from the Great War of the Californias, a faux
documentation of the war between Southern and Northern California taking place in the not-too-distant future but painted in a WPA-era style of the past. He also exhibited his Prisonation series, of paintings of California prison landscapes, widely throughout California in 2000 and 2001. This year he enjoyed a retrospective at the Sonoma Museum of Art, and two exhibitions of works on paper in San Francisco, at Catharine Clark Gallery and 111 Minna Gallery.
Sandow Birk (born Seal Beach, CA, 1962) received his BFA from the Otis Institute of Parson's School of Design, Los Angeles, CA (1988) and studied painting and art history at both the American College in Paris/Parson's School of Design, Paris, France (1984-5) and The Bath Academy of Art, Bath, England (1985). Mr. Birk was granted the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1995 and received a Fullbright Fellowship to travel to Brazil in 1996/7. Mr. Birk, besides being a painter and visual artist, is also an avid surfer. He is represented by Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco.
IN THE PROJECT ROOM:
AMY JEAN PORTER
The Birds of North America Misquote Hip-hop and Sometimes Pause for Reflection
Amy Jean Porter's The Birds... consists of 508 (as in John James Audubon's The Birds of North America) index card size drawings of birds doing exactly that. Exhibited for the first time in their full array, the crowded mass of the flock becomes a sweet funky meditation on order and chaos, taxonomy and language. Ms. Porter received her M.Phil in Textual and Visual Studies from Trinity College in Dublin in 2000, and her B.A. from Yale University in 1997. The Birds... was excerpted in Cabinet Magazine in Summer, 2002.