Works

Exhibition Details

Throughout Clark Gallery’s thirty-year history, painting, works on paper, and sculpture have been extensively exhibited.  Through Jim Dow Photographs and Erica Daborn Interplay: The Painter’s Dialogue with Photography, on view from May 3 through 30, 2008, photography will be introduced to the gallery’s exhibition programming.  The featured work, supplemented by a compelling collection of photographs hung in the gallery’s office space, will present photography as a significant medium important to Clark and one that the gallery intends to exhibit in the future.

Jim Dow’s photographs focus on the passage of time as it is recorded in landscapes from North Dakota to Great Britain to Argentina.  Using an 8 x 10 inch view camera, Dow turns his lens to roadside signs, aging buildings, and interiors that feel locked in another era.  His images honestly record the scenes before his camera, avoiding sentiments of nostalgia while paying tribute to marks made to the land by current and past residents.  A leading American photographer, Dow pushes his viewer to reconsider familiar surroundings and discern the beauty and cultural history hidden in a North Dakota car wash, Argentinean barbershop, or British convenience store.

Jim Dow is an internationally exhibited artist represented in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, J. Paul Getty Museum, Library of Congress, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.  Dow has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, LEF Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship among many other grants and commissions.  His work has been published in Marking the Land (2007) and Where We Live: Photographs from the Berman Collection (2006) as well as in international magazines and academic and fine art journals.  Dow has taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts for over twenty years.

Enlarged images found in photographic books from the 1940s and 1950s are the surfaces upon which Erica Daborn creates her densely layered drawings.  Painting the bookplate to obliterate the original scene, Daborn scrapes and rubs away places to reveal traces of the underlying photograph.  The uncovered imagery is then reinterpreted through the lines, smudges, drawings, and drips of ink, pencil, and graphite that Daborn applies.  The found photograph and applied drawing uniquely interact, creating a visual stimulus with great depth and charged meaning.

Erica Daborn has been featured in exhibitions at the Royal College of Art, London, Olin College, Annette Howell Turner Center for the Arts in Georgia, Fresno Art Museum, Danforth Art Museum, New Art Center, Brandeis University, as well as numerous museums and galleries in the U.S. and abroad.  Daborn has received enrichment grants from the Cushman Family Foundation and Virginia Center for Creative Arts and given lectures at Wellesley College, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and universities in Colorado, Illinois, and Nevada.  Daborn teaches at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.