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Fine Art PR Publicity Announcements News and Information

Andrew Moore & Simon Chaput Solo Shows at Jackson Fine Art

Jackson Fine Art is pleased to present two contrasting solo shows by New York- based photographers Andrew Moore and Simon Chaput.

Andrew Moore’s large-scale images depicting the ruined, yet ornate, remains of Detroit bring a new life to these otherwise stagnant and abandoned locations. Alternatively, with his use of lighting and black backgrounds, Simon Chaput has imposed his own still, quiet beauty to typically animated subjects: waterfalls and nudes.

Andrew Moore’s exhibition is the result of seven trips made to Detroit over the duration of two years. Moore’s show provides a view into the city’s most lavish and opulent interiors which are now declining and forgotten. Moore illustrates that a weakened economy and the forces of time have reduced Detroit’s old symbols of prosperity into a depressed forecast of our nation’s future yet he captures unexplainable and unexpected beauty of a city in collapse. The decaying interiors depict bleakness and despair but when examined further, beauty emerges. Moore states: “My interests have always laid at the busy intersection of history, particularly at those locations where multiple tangents of time overlap and tangle…Detroit is more than a story of physical decline, decay, and transformation; it is a city where the distortion of time is inventing new symbols for the America of the future.”

Andrew Moore has captured beauty from areas of Detroit that were once obvious signs of prosperity, but now dismantled. These images have taken on the look of uninhabited ruins. A carpeted floor is covered by vibrant green moss in a photograph taken of an office that was once Henry Ford’s exquisite executive office at the Model T Headquarters. And from peeling paint and decaying metal, an organ screen in the old United Artist Theater becomes an abstract image filled with purple hues and an enigmatic electrifying glow

Andrew Moore’s new, and yet to be released publication Detroit: Disassembled will be available during Jackson Fine Art’s exhibition. The book contains an essay by Detroit’s native Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Philip Levine. This book is an addition to Moore’s two previous monographs Inside Havana and Russia. Andrew attended Princeton University where he is currently an adjunct professor and his photographs have been acquired by numerous museum collections including The Whitney Museum of America Art, The Canadian Center for Architecture, The San Francisco Museum of Art, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, and The International Center of Photography.

Waterfalls and Nudes is an exciting collection of Simon Chaput’s high-contrast, black and white photographs, capturing subjects that give the exhibition it’s name. Chaput began this style, which puts just as much emphasis on the negative space as the positive, in 1996 with his images of buildings in Manhattan. He was able to present a fresh perspective on familiar territory; the same can be said for his waterfalls and nudes. At first glance the subject may appear to be a rolling landscape, but beyond the immediate simplicity of the image lays a very intimate view of the body. His use of the silver gelatin medium produces fine grainy textures that emphasize the stone-like sculptural nature of these human forms. Chaput’s waterfalls are taken out of their natural environment and placed on the same stark black background as his nudes. It has a similar effect, morphing these beautiful bodies of water into a vision of something else: draped linens or bizarre architectural structures. By pulling these waterfalls and nudes out of context, Chaput is, quite literally, shedding a new light on a historically popular subject matter.

Simon Chaput was born in France in 1952. Originally working as an art dealer, he moved to New York in the 1980s to follow that career. Chaput is an extensive traveler and began photographing in the late ’80s. This early color work features subjects from around the world and was widely published in magazines and books for stories written on Buddhism and ancient cultures. He has fully immersed himself in the art scene, collaborating on projects with the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and working with award-winning directors and producers on documentary films. In 2000, Chaput was a recipient of a photography grant from the Henry Luce Foundation. His work is included in Private and institutional collections in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, England, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Mexico, Switzerland, and the United States and recent articles on his photographs can be found in L’Officiel (2009), VS Magazine (2009), and Kyoto Journal (2009) to name a few.

Jackson Fine Art 3115 East Shadowlawn Avenue Atlanta, GA 30305 tel 404.233.3739 fax 404.233.1205

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