Opening tonight at Senior & Shopmaker Gallery in New York City is Wegman Outdoors, an exhibition of photographs (1981-2007) by Season 1 artist William Wegman. The exhibition will bring together classic Wegman images with rarely exhibited material and surprising new work to reveal the full range of the artist’s outdoor color photography. The show will coincide with the opening of William Wegman’s new video work commissioned by the Madison Square Park Conservancy, Around the Park, a narrative film shot entirely in the park and presented on outdoor monitors surrounding the Shake Shack.
The subject of landscape has been a constant theme in Wegman’s painting, drawing, and conceptual photographs of the 1970s. In the early 1980s, the artist’s approach to photography broadened from the posed studio shots of his canine muse, Man Ray, to outdoor photographs integrating the dog with the Maine landscape where the artist spent summers. The show includes a rare 3-panel narrative of Man Ray gazing into a pond; in another the dog, his body covered with leaves, blends seamlessly into an autumnal landscape. Landscape again appears in the chromogenic prints Wegman began to make in 2000. Set into the crevices of rock formations, sprawled on a dock at sunset, or dwarfed in large vistas of the Rangeley Lakes region, these images of the dogs are closer to the modernist photography of Edward Weston and Paul Strand than Wegman’s conceptual work of the ’70s. The exhibition also contains several new images from 2007, made with a digital camera with a Hasselblad lens attachment, which expand upon the themes of the c-prints.
The exhibition at Senior & Shopmaker runs through November 3. Read more about it here and on the artist’s website at www.wegmanworld.com. Watch a video interview with Wegman about his art installation in Madison Square Park here.