Photographer Rob Hornstra and journalist Arnold van Bruggen are documenting the rapidly-changing region around Sochi, a former Soviet resort on the Black Sea, which is preparing to host the 2014 Winter Olympics. The exhibition at the DePaul Art Museum shows extraordinary photos, together with interviews and films, recording a complicated mix of parallel realities as a massive but temporary international event descends and disappears.

Sochi is the Florida of Russia, but cheaper. It is famous for its subtropical vegetation, hotels and sanatoria. People from all over the Soviet Union associate the coastal city with beach holidays and first loves. The smell of sunscreen, sweat, alcohol and roasting meat pervades the air. Nothing happens here in the winter. But that’s about to change. The Winter Games are coming to town.

The ice skating venues in the old summer capital of Sochi resemble spaceships that have landed on the coast. The most expensive road in the world now links these venues with the ski resorts in the mountains. The Games in Sochi are the most expensive ever organised. But the workers at the bottom of the food chain are rarely paid. Local residents are sceptical.

More than five years have passed since Abkhazia officially gained independence in 2008, but almost nothing in the country has changed. The Olympics have had no impact on tourism and the leadership appears to want to do little about it. A few new houses, roads, schools and amenities have been built, but otherwise Abkhazia seems to stand still – as Sochi 2014 approaches.

In the run-up to the Olympic Games, security forces have been given a free hand in the North Caucasus. An attack in Sochi has to be avoided at all cost. Human rights organisations and lawyers are working overtime. Young men in particular are kidnapped, disappear or are thrown in jail on trumped-up charges. Terrorists commit seemingly random attacks on police and civilians.

All the test events and championships in Sochi have been declared successful. The stadiums are finished. Let the Games begin! But with only months to go before the opening ceremony, reports have surfaced that North Caucasian militants in Syria are being urged to return home and continue fighting in Russia and Sochi. Campaigns have been launched around the world in protest against Putin’s repressive government. Human rights activists are calling for demonstrations at the Olympics themselves to protest new Russian laws on homosexuality. Cracks are beginning to appear in Putin’s prestige project.

“The Sochi Project: An Atlas of War and Tourism in the Caucasus”
January 9, 2014 – March 23, 2014
DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL

FRAMING SPECIFICATIONS AND ADVICE

GALLERY FRAMES

Thin Profile: 102
Type: Thin Gallery Frame
Wood & Finish: maple wood frame with black opaque finish
Purchasing Options: joined wood frame with splines
Framing Advice: fitting gallery frames

Laurie Frick opens an exhibit at the Marfa Contemporary Gallery “Walking, Eating, Sleeping” and it takes an obsessive, quantitative look at daily life, drawing on Frick’s background in engineering and technology.The artwork of Laurie Frick explores the intersection of technology and creativity as the artist herself adopts a daily regimen of self-tracking that measures her activities and body. In doing so, she shapes a vocabulary of pattern used to construct her intricately hand- built works and installations. Her quantifiable patterns, like her heart rate, the duration of her sleep or body weight are some of the metrics that inspire her colorful and complex works. “Numbers are abstract concepts but we recognize pattern intuitively. I’m experimenting with wall size patterns that anticipate the condition of our daily-selves. Very soon walls and spaces we occupy will be filled with easy to decode patterns – a visual record of how we feel, stress level, mood, bio-function captured, digitally recorded and physically produced using 3D printers and lasercutters. Human data portraits transcribed as pattern from the all the sensor data collected about us.Will it kill the mystery of being human, simply magnify our defects or will sensors and a mass of measurements acknowledge and present patterns of self-examination that lure us into a future of self-quantification that is irresistible?” Laurie Frick is a TED Award winner.

Laurie Frick: Walking, Eating, Sleeping
September 10 – Janaury 3, 2014
Artist Talk Sunday Oct 13 at 11.30 am
Marfa Contemporary
Marfa, TX 79843

FRAMING SPECIFICATIONS AND ADVICE

METRO GALLERY FRAME

Thin Profile: 114
Type: Thin Gallery Frame
Wood & Finish: Unfinished Ash Wood Frame
Purchasing Option: joined wood frame with contrasting splines
Framing Advice: fitting gallery frames

“George Morrison’s importance to our understanding of twentieth-century Native American art is unparalleled,” says Kristin Makholm, executive director of the Minnesota Museum of American Art. “This first, comprehensive retrospective of his work will reveal how visions of identity and place play an essential role in assessing American art of the 20th century and beyond.”

The Minnesota Museum of American Art launched Modern Spirit: The Art of George Morrison, an exhibition of about 80 drawings, paintings, prints, and sculptures at the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, North Dakota on June 16, 2013. Modern Spirit surveys the prolific career of George Morrison (1919–2000), a distinctive and well-loved artist whose works bring together concepts of abstraction, landscape, and spiritual reflection and draw from his physical and spiritual homelands—speaking to both American urban settings and to the solitude of Northern Minnesota.

Modern Spirit spans the entire breadth of Morrison’s oeuvre, from early figurative drawings and Regionalist paintings of the 1940s to monumental abstract landscapes and wood sculptures of the 1970s onward. Many of the works in the exhibition draw from Morrison’s early career in New York, Providence, and Provincetown and refer to important art historical movements such as Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism. Modern Spirit also presents Morrison’s works from the 1970s to the 1990s, which were inspired in part by the artist’s home on the north shore of Lake Superior. This body of work includes line drawings on colored papers, sketches of constellations over Lake Superior, and several paintings of forms breaking up in front of the abstracted shoreline. In terms of technique, these later paintings—quiet, lyrical, and meditative—synthesize Impressionism with Expressionism, while retaining the artist’s trademark representation of nature, land, and the horizon.

Part of a unique collaboration between the Minnesota Museum of American Art and Minneapolis-based Arts Midwest, which helped organize and launch the exhibition, Modern Spirit will tour to five venues across the United States before closing in May 2015: Plains Art Museum (Fargo, North Dakota); Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (New York, New York); Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art (Indianapolis, Indiana); Heard Museum (Phoenix, Arizona); and the Minnesota History Center (St. Paul, Minnesota).

Cumulated Landscape, 1976, wood, 48 x 120 x 3 in. Collection Minnesota Museum of American Art. Gift of Honeywell Inc. 2000.01

Untitled, 1995, colored pencil on paper, 10 5/8 x 13 5/8 in. Collection Dr. Robert and Frances Leff

Spirit Path, New Day, Red Rock Variation: Lake Superior Landscape, 1990, acrylic and pastel on paper, 22 1/2 x 30 1/8 in. Collection Minnesota Museum of American Art.

Sun and River, 1949, watercolor and crayon on paper, 15 3/4 x 21 in. Copyright Plains Art Museum. From the permanent collection of the Plains Art Museum, Fargo, North Dakota.

Black and White Patterned Forms, 1952, ink on paper, 10 3/4 x 8 3/8 in. Collection Minnesota Museum of American Art. Gift of George Morrison. 96.10.14

Modern Spirit: The Art of George Morrison
June 16-Sept. 1, 2013
Plains Art Museum
Fargo, ND 58102

FRAMING SPECIFICATIONS AND ADVICE

METRO GALLERY FRAME

Thin Profile: 102
Type: Thin Gallery Frame
Wood & Finish: maple wood frame with clear lacquer finish
Purchasing Option: joined wood frame
Framing Advice: fitting gallery frames

Poet, mystic, and spokesman for the Beat generation, Allen Ginsberg also photographed his friends and lovers over the years. He made albums of these photos, with elaborate hand-written captions. Allen Ginsberg’s photographs will be on view at the Grey Art Gallery at NYU from January 15 – April 6, 2013.

Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg

© 2012 The Allen Ginsberg LLC. All rights reserved.

© 2012 The Allen Ginsberg LLC. All rights reserved.

© 2012 The Allen Ginsberg LLC. All rights reserved.

“Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg”
January 15 – April 6, 2013
Grey Art Gallery NYU,
New York, NY

FRAMING SPECIFICATIONS AND ADVICE

METRO GALLERY FRAME

Thin Profile: 114
Type: thin gallery frame
Wood & Finish: maple wood frame with black opaque finish
Purchasing Options: joined wood frame with splines
Framing Advice: fitting gallery frames

“Gowin and Gohlke were both innovative, influential practitioners of landscape photography when each decided, independently, to photograph the aftermath of the cataclysmic 1980 eruption of this volcano in Washington State,” says Barbara Tannenbaum, the organizing curator and the curator of photography at the Cleveland Museum of Art. “Photographing at Mount St. Helens transformed their approaches to landscape and forever changed the course of their art.”

Because access to the mountain was initially limited to flyovers, both photographers took to the air during their initial visit to investigate the newborn land around the mountain. It was Gowin’s first experience with aerial photography, a practice that would soon become central to his landscape work. He made several trips there between 1980 and 1986. Gohlke returned to the region numerous times between 1981 and 1990 and his photographs testify to the volcano’s destructive force but also chronicle the land’s rebirth during its first decade. 

Tannenbaum says that “American Vesuvius is the first time that in-depth selections from Gowin and Gohlke’s Mount St. Helens images have been together in a single exhibition. Visitors to the exhibition will have a unique opportunity to compare and contrast the work of these eminent photographers while exploring nature’s destruction, then regeneration, of Mount St. Helens.”

American Vesuvius is presented in conjunction with The Last Days of Pompeii: Decadence, Apocalypse, Resurrection and will be on view in Photography Galleries from January 13 to May 12, 2013.

About the Artists

Frank Gohlke (born 1942, Texas) has been a leading figure in landscape photography for over three decades. He earned a BA in English Literature from the University of Texas at Austin in 1964 and an MA in English Literature from Yale University in 1966. While at Yale, he studied photography with landscape photographer Paul Caponigro. Gohlke has received numerous awards including two Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Gund Foundation. His works have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Art among others.

Emmet Gowin (born in 1941, Virginia) has been a prominent figure in photography since 1970s. He earned a BA in graphic design from Richmond Professional Institute (Virginia Commonwealth University) in 1965 and an MFA in photography at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1967. Gowin taught at Princeton University for 25 years and has influenced innumerable photographers through his own work and his academic career. He has received numerous awards including ones from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Pew Foundation and the State of Pennsylvania. His works have been exhibited widely at museums such as the Cleveland Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Mount St. Helens, rim, crater, and lava dome, 1982. Frank Gohlke. Gelatin silver print; 37 7/8 x 43 5/8 in. © Frank Gohlke / courtesy: Howard Greenberg Gallery	Blown down and standing dead trees at edge of impact zone, 4 miles west of Mount St. Helens, 1982. Frank Gohlke. Gelatin silver print; 25 x 29 in. © Frank Gohlke / courtesy: Howard Greenberg Gallery
Elk Rock, Mount St. Helens, Washington, 1981. Emmet Gowin. Gelatin silver print; 11 x 14 in. © Emmet and Edith Gowin; courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York	Ash from Mount St. Helens at the confluence of the Cowlitz and Columbia Rivers, Washington, 1984. Emmet Gowin. Gelatin silver print; 11 x 14 in. © Emmet and Edith Gowin; courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

“American Vesuvius: The Aftermath of Mount St. Helens
by Frank Gohlke and Emmet Gowin”
January 13 – May 12, 2013
Cleveland Museum of Art

FRAMING SPECIFICATIONS AND ADVICE

METRO GALLERY FRAME

Standard Profile: 106 and Thin Profile: 114
Type: Standard Gallery Frame and Thin Gallery Frame
Wood & Finish: maple wood frame with black opaque finish
Purchasing Options: joined wood frame with splines
Custom Wood Strainers: 1/2″ & 3/4″ wood frame strainers
Framing Advice: fitting gallery frames

Adam Davies “Boundaries and Transitions” opens October 2 at The Arts Club of Washington. Born in the United Kingdom, Adam Davies is a photographer whose work explores the edges of American urban and rural landscapes. Davies has recently attended residencies at Yaddo, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Chinati Foundation. Currently a DC resident, Davies was a finalist for both the 2010 & 2011 Trawick Foundation Prize and was awarded a 2010-2011 DCArts Artist Fellowship. Davies has held teaching positions at Carnegie Mellon University, Robert Morris University, and Harvard University. He is currently a lecturer at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work bridges traditional and contemporary methods of photography. I use an 8 by 10 inch large format view-camera similar to those used by nineteenth-century landscape photographers. The color negatives are digitally scanned and printed on archival inkjet paper. I photograph sites at the periphery. Through placement of the camera, selection of light, and control of the depth of field within the picture, I try to create a dreamlike or fantastical sense of place, one shaped not only by traditions of landscape photography but also by ruin and capricci painters such as Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Hubert Robert. My pictures are not digitally manipulated. It is important that the key elements are found rather than invented.

“Boundaries and Transitions”
October 2 – October 28, 2012
The Arts Club of Washington
Washington, DC
Adam Davies

Artist’s Reception October 11, 2012 6:30 – 9:00 pm

FRAMING SPECIFICATIONS AND ADVICE

“The frames arrived as planned on last Friday, were excellently packed and look fantastic as usual!” This is exactly what we like to hear from our customers.

GALLERY FRAMES

Standard Profile: 106 and Thin Profile: 114
Type: Standard Gallery Frame and Thin Gallery Frame
Wood & Finish: maple wood frame with white opaque finish
Purchasing Options: joined wood frame
Framing Advice: fitting gallery frames