Opening Friday, November 18: Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Eric Baudelaire
Franklin Art Works is pleased to premier a photographic installation by the New York artist Paul Mpagi Sepuya and present a video projection by the Paris-based artist Eric Baudelaire.
The exhibitions open with an opening reception on Friday, November 18, 2011 from 6 to 8pm. Both exhibitions will remain on view through January 28, 2012.
This is the first exhibition in Minnesota for both artists. Paul Sepuya will be in attendance at the opening.
In the Main Gallery
Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Studio Work
The New York artist Paul Mpagi Sepuya will premier a table top installation incorporating framed and unframed photographs, potted plants, stacks of books, orange rinds along with photographs traditionally mounted on the gallery walls.
Studio Work is Sepuya’s most recent body of work, developed during his 2011-2012 artist residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem. The project is both a volume of photographs – formal portraits, loose snapshots, still-lifes and details of the his studio space - and an installation composed of those materials accumulated in the studio, tracing the artist’s occupation and photo-making from the beginning to the end of the residency. “My studio was private, but not a closed environment. Rather, it was a stage that I inhabited and opened to those around me.”
Paul Mpagi Sepuya received a BFA from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and has exhibited internationally at venues including The Studio Museum in Harlem, White Columns, Artists Space, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, envoy enterprises, Vox Poluli (Philadelphia), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Exile Berlin, and the Office for Contemporary Art (Oslo).
In the Screening Room
Eric Baudelaire: Sugar Water
The Paris-based artist Eric Baudelaire will present his video Sugar Water. The video takes place in the Paris metro, and features a man wearing a blue work suit pasting a sequence of images within a baroque, gold framed billboard. The sequence of photographic images depict a car parked on a Parisian street that bursts into flames, becomes engulfed in smoke, and then the remains of the blackened car.
Using a laborious traditional billboard pasting system to mount each scene, one on top of the other, this cinematic event gradually unfolds over the 72-minute film, “offering a slow contemplative consideration of political violence as a counterpoint to the rapid barrage of images we typically experience in our news media. Despite its slow, nearly meditative pace, Baudelaire creates a haunting and provocative work that completely absorbs the viewer.”–Anne Ellgood, Hammer Museum
Eric Baudelaire was born in Salt Lake City, and now lives and works in Paris. He has exhibition extensively at international venues including the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Centre Pomipdou (Paris), Rencontres de la Photographie (Arles), Centrale Electrique (Brussels), FRAC (Auvergne), Centre Photographie d’lle de France (Pontault-Combault), and Musée de la Photographie (Charleroi, Belgium), among many other venues and is represented by Elizabeth Dee Gallery (New York).
