Elizabeth Peyton and Serge Spitzer at The Aldrich In Ridgefield
On June 22, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut will mount the first exhibition of Elizabeth Peyton’s photographs. Known for her intimate paintings of both friends and celebrities, she has offered few opportunities to view her photographic work.
Photography is a significant part of Peyton’s practice, as a tool for gathering imagery for her paintings and drawings, but also as an end in itself. The exhibition will include approximately fifty portraits—including two standout self-portraits—that she has taken of friends and colleagues in the creative arena between 1994 and 2008.
A consistent thread in Serge Spitzer’s 35-year career as an artist has been the concept of “hiding things in plain sight.” Spitzer’s major new installation at The Aldrich, Still Life, continues this concern via the deceptively simple gesture of placing tens of thousands of custom-made tennis balls in a grid over the Museum’s two-acre sculpture garden. The balls are printed with a military-inspired, pixilated camouflage pattern that closely matches the color of the Museum’s lawn.
Traditionally a still life is a composition of inanimate objects. The tennis balls in Spitzer’s Still Life, however, animate both space and meaning as circumstances cause them to move inexorably through the world like a virus, claiming their role (in the words of the artist) as “reality models.” Although simple in plan and execution, Spitzer’s project has subtle social and political overtones. Inferences can be drawn about “taking over” a fraction of Connecticut s genteel landscape with objects that imply both leisure, play, and military occupation, while the project’s material component has been manufactured overseas, adding to the United States’s huge trade imbalance.
For more information visit www.aldrichart.org
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