February 4, 2020—March 21, 2020 | Reception Saturday, Feb 8th, 3-5PM
James Harris Gallery is pleased to present Blow Up, our fifth solo exhibition by New York based artist Bing Wright. This new series marks the artist return to color photography after seven years. Inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1967 movie of the same title Blow Up, Wright’s photographs explore ideas of ambiguity and perception, underlying themes found in the movie. Wright’s works are a combination of visual layering in which two blow up details from a single image are placed on top of one another. Like Antonio’s film, Wright’s photographs reveal the mystery of looking deep into a photographic image, resulting in works that visually question the reality of an implied narrative.
Bing Wright
Wright has always been fascinated by the correlation between the photo and a mirror, both being silver based picture planes. At the beginning of his artistic career, Wright was exposed to the potential of the medium by John Szarkowski’s legendary exhibition Mirror and Windows in 1978, which reconstructed the framework of the photographic image as a two-dimensional pictorial surface into a conceptual space. With a postmodern perspective of the photographic image, the medium expanded into diverse practices that continue to reorient our relationship to photography.
Bing Wright was born in Seattle in 1958 and received a Bachelor of Arts in Art History from Columbia University, New York. His work been shown in exhibitions at the New Museum, New York; White Columns, New York; the Queens Museum of Art, New York; and the Tang Museum and Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs, among others. His work is in several public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, the Portland Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase Bank, and Citigroup. Wright recently curated an exhibition of 1970s photography from the collection of the Washington Art Consortium. He lives and works in New York City.