Americana: Faces & Places

The Gerald Peters Gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition of portraits, landscapes, and pictures of American pastimes by new gallery photographers. This exhibition of color and black-and-white works by Subhankar Banerjee, Dan Budnik, Jack Kotz, Melville McLean, Terry Moore, and Craig Varjabedian features varying, sometimes opposing perspectives on what it means to be to be part of this vast American landscape, for better or worse. The exhibition is from December 2, 2005 to January 7, 2006. An opening reception with the artists will be held on Friday, December 2, from 5 to 7 p.m.

(PRWEB) November 12, 2005 -- The Gerald Peters Gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition of portraits, landscapes, and pictures of American pastimes by new gallery photographers. This exhibition of color and black-and-white works by Subhankar Banerjee, Dan Budnik, Jack Kotz, Melville McLean, Terry Moore, and Craig Varjabedian features varying, sometimes opposing perspectives on what it means to be to be part of this vast American landscape, for better or worse. The exhibition is from December 2, 2005 to January 7, 2006. An opening reception with the artists will be held on Friday, December 2, from 5 to 7 p.m.

The subjects of New Mexican photographer Craig Varjabedian—cowboys, rural Catholic churches, windmills, age-old mesas—reveal an elusive spiritualism that is deeply tied to place. Dan Budnik’s portraits penetrate the character of well-known cultural icons such as Jasper Johns, David Smith, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Subhankar Banerjee’s portraits of the native people of Alaska engaged in subsistence fishing and hunting reveal a more down-to-earth, but no less fascinating side of the American experience. The images by Santa Fe photographer Jack Kotz expose the regional flavors of places as diverse as the rural South and tourist stops in Florida. And Melville McLean’s pristine, unpeopled landscapes of Maine and the West impart a subtle and nuanced environmental vulnerability.

All of these faces and places, whether pristine or spoiled, speak to our American cultural identity and relationship to the land. These portraits of regions and how they have been celebrated, impacted, or exploited by American culture are the crux of the exhibition. All of these exceptional photographers travel extensively to capture that elusive, but intuitively recognizable quality of American-ness in our nation’s faces and places.

For more information, including biography and images, please contact Cindy Lane, Business Manager of Craig Varjabedian Photography at (505)983-2934 or Catherine Whitney, Director of Twentieth-Century American Art and Photography, at (505) 954-5716. The gallery is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday and is located at 1011 Paseo de Peralta in Santa Fe, New Mexico, 87501.

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