Exhibition: “Jessica Todd Harper: Interior Exposure”
April 2 – May 10, 2008
The Cohen Amador Gallery is pleased to announce “Interior Exposure,” an exhibition of work by the American photographer Jessica Todd Harper, from her newly published book of the same title. Harper’s sensual and luminous interiors trace the complex psychological connections among an extended web of family and friends.
Harper’s otherworldly images combine the devotional intensity of Northern Renaissance artists with a tenderness and quiet eroticism. With a degree in Art History, and having spent much of her childhood copying museum paintings, Harper combines ethereal lighting and delicate color in images whose careful composition belies the seeming spontaneity of the emotionally charged scenes. Her camera becomes an additional member of this extended Anglican clan, unobtrusively bringing the viewer into their living rooms, kitchens, and beds.
The subjects of the pictures, mostly female, return the viewer’s gaze without concern, unthreatened and calmly welcoming. No one speaks in her pictures, their resolutely closed mouths making their eyes immensely powerful. Captured in the mute medium of photography, the women in her pictures are put on equal footing with the historical portraiture that sometimes appears in the background. There is an undercurrent of female productive power, generations of women and their children filling the frames, occasionally nude, classically beautiful and radiating a quiet strength.
Jessica Todd Harper was born in 1975 in Albany, New York. She is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College with a BA in Art History, and holds an MFA in photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology. She has had numerous solo exhibitions and her work has been widely published internationally. “Interior Exposure,” a photo-book of her work, will be published in 2008 by the Italian publisher Damiani. Jessica Todd Harper’s work is in the permanent collections of the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and the Houston Museum of Fine Art. She was chosen as one of PDN’s 30 for 2005, and teaches both at the International Center of Photography in New York and at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.
The Cohen Amador Gallery is located in the landmark Fuller Building at 41 East 57th Street on the 6th floor. Gallery hours are 11 to 6 Tuesday through Saturday and by appointment. For additional information, please contact the gallery at (212) 759-6740, visit www.cohenamador.com or contact us at info@cohenamador.com.