Tuesday, January 27, 2015

John Coplans Photographs in Exhibition at the Columbus College of Art & Design

John Coplans in Sitter
at the Columbus College of Art & Design


January 23—April 23, 2015



 
Dawoud Bey      John Coplans     Doug Ischar    Hrair Sarkissian       Doug Biggert     Rineke Dijkstra     Natile Krick    Celia Shapiro     Matthew Brandt     Craig Doty           Leigh Ledare       Daniel Shea         Mike Brodie      Gustavo Germano Ausencias     Catherine Opie        Anna Shteynshleyge          Robert Buck        Nan Goldin             Suzanne Opton      Arne Svenson       Kelli Connell       Katie Grannan        JR             Brian Ulrich       Nina Katchadourian       Philip-Lorca diCorcia      Michael Wolf


Sitter will explore the fecund manifestations of the idea of the “portrait” as it exists in contemporary photography.

From John Coplans’ mapping of the entropic landscape of his own aging body to Katy Grannan’s spontaneous collaborations with strangers met on the streets of San Francisco to Rineke Dijkstra’s deep stares into the awkwardness of formative adolescent identity to Matthew Brandt’s linking of process, the body and self, Sitterwill present a wide range of “portraits” each expanding the idea of what the portrait can be. Sitter brings together conceptual artists, whose practices address an underlying sociopolitical agenda as well as artists and social documentarians that utilize strategies to subjectively shape the portraits they create. The convergence of these approaches yields work that carefully balances aesthetics, political ideas and the essence of identity to frame important social issues in a contemporary manner.

While issues of identity are certainly addressed—whether national, sexual, racial or political—there are also bodies of work that delve into the idea of place and its role in shaping the lives of the individuals that have chosen to live there. The exhibition will also investigate ideas of the public and the private and the interior and exterior lives of the people, groups and places the artists have chosen to encapsulate in their work while still confronting the uneasy prospect of anonymity and the presumption that a portrait allows us to know each subject.

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