Artist’s Talk with Justine Kurland, NYC

by Laurie Henzel

Curious about how a successful artist works and what inspires them? Come hear artist Jusine Kurland speak at the Aperture Gallery this Wednesday Oct. 1st at 6:30. its FREE!
547 West 27th Street, 4th floor
New York, New York
(212) 505-5555

Justine Kurland’s photographs are about adolescence, awkwardness, girls, the American landscape, secrets, and quiet, private dreams of community that hide behind tough exteriors and blank faces. Kurland spends as much as 9 months out of the year on road trips, searching out, rather than staging, her narratives, and her work are often the results of these extended trips. Relatively large-scale, and often theatrically composed, Kurland’s images position their subjects hanging out together in forsaken corners of forgotten fields, forests, highway underpasses, lakes and beaches. Her landscapes and her figures are analogies of each other, in-between spaces where identity and function have not yet been fixed or have begun to slip ambiguously into freedom. Recent work considers community more generally, focusing on present-day communes and people united by a choice to live ‘off-the-grid.’ In 2004 Kurland shifted her focus to motherhood. This critically acclaimed body of work is the culmination of the earlier girl photographs and the commune photographs, answering the search for home and family.  Justine Kurland was born in 1969, Warsaw, NY, and lives and works in New York. She has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe. Recent exhibitions include one-person shows at The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NY, Emily Tsingou Gallery, London, Gorney Bravin + Lee, NY, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and group shows at the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C., American Folk Art Museum, and St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri. Kurlands work will be included in the upcoming exhibition Into the Sunset: Photographys Image of the American West, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her work has been featured in publications including Artforum, Art in America, The New York Times, Vogue, Blind Spot, The New Yorker, Frieze, and Flash Art. Her work is represented in several public collections including theSolomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, The International Center of Photography, New York, and Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago.

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