Alone Street, 2018-2019, Gregory Crewdson, 50 × 89 IN. (UNFRAMED) / 57 1/8 × 95 5/8 × 2 IN. (FRAMED) — *Alone Street, 2018-2019, Gregory Crewdson,* 50 × 89 IN. (UNFRAMED) / 57 1/8 × 95 5/8 × 2 IN. (FRAMED)

Gregory Crewdson at Templon

Four years after the spectacular Cathedral of the Pines show, Gregory Crewdson’s latest series An Eclipse of Moths will premiere in Europe at Templon in Paris. This ensemble of sixteen panoramic photographs is the result of over two years’ work.

In an America mired in a health and political crisis, with the presidential campaign in full swing, Gregory Crewdson, the undisputed master of staged photography, offers an empathetic and critical reflection on his country. Depicting outdoor scenes in a small, desolate town in postindustrial New England, the artist conceived the works as a meditation on the fragility of the world, brokenness, the yearning for redemption and the quest for transcendence.

For more than 25 years, Gregory Crewdson has been creating complex, skilfully staged photographs that draw greatly on the codes of cinema. His creative process is similar to film production with all its logistical and technical complexity: storyboard, team of technicians, choice of sites, sophisticated lighting and actors' poses. In consultation with the municipality, the artist spent months travelling around the city before finding the various places that served as sets, including a taxi depot, an abandoned factory complex, a concrete burial vaults facility, deserted backyards... Crewdson has swapped the intimate interiors that made him famous for urban landscapes that are both grandiose and disturbing. The action seems to be multiplied by several focal points and ambiguous scenes: two coffins abandoned on the road while an empty stretcher waits on the lawn; a motorist immobilized by fallen traffic lights while a man stares at a baby's bottle; a homeless man facing a puddle of rose petals while idle youngsters hang around in front of a container. Every detail, street name or accessory casts an unexpected light on the palpable loneliness of the characters.

Motionless, lost, the protagonists of these ambitious compositions evoke the moths chosen for the exhibition's title. Gregory Crewdson explains that he chose the image of an eclipse of moths to evoke the phenomenon whereby the insects, drawn by the artificial lights of the city, cluster together and lose their bearings. A metaphor for our contemporary disorientation, these works subtly question the vulnerability of the human condition and the paradoxes of the American dream. Never didactic, they leave the viewer free to imagine the stories hidden beneath the surface and dream of other possibilities.

Born in 1962 in Brooklyn, New York, Crewdson is a graduate of SUNY Purchase and the Yale University School of Art, where he is now director of graduate studies in photography. His work has been widely exhibited and collected by museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Brooklyn Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Smithsonian American Museum in Washington. In Europe, he has recently exhibited his work at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Toruń, Poland (2018), The Photographer's Gallery, London (2018) and FRAC Auvergne in Clermont Ferrand (2017). He has been represented by Galerie Templon since 2004 and this will be his fourth exhibition with the gallery in Paris.

Gregory Crewdson

An Eclipse of Moths

Galerie Templon

November 7 – January 23, 2021

More information regarding the exhibition can be found at www.templon.com

Lisa Crafts, Rigoberto Lara Guzmán, Urban Farmer, 2017

On the Inside: Portraiture Through Photography

LISA CRAFTS, LAURA HEYMAN, PIXY LIAO, SVEN MARQUARDT AND MARIE TOMANOVA

On the Inside: Portraiture Through Photography, featuring the work of Lisa Crafts, Laura Heyman, Pixy Liao, Sven Marquardt and Marie Tomanova. This body of work by an international assembling of photographers encompassing cultural backgrounds and content from Germany, China, Japan, Czechoslovakia, Haiti and the US, offers a collection of images borne of deeply personal connections, resulting in intimate and revealing portraits from around the globe. The exhibition opens on Saturday, October 3rd and will be on view through Thursday, December 24th, 2020.

The artists featured in On the Inside each realize their images through distinctive versions of an insider’s perspective.

Lisa Crafts spends months investigating the worlds of the environmental and social justice activists, thinkers and dreamers at the center of her animated portraits, personally sourcing natural and technological elements, such as small animals that are lovingly photographed and released back into their natural habitats with gratitude.

Laura Heyman as an outsider in a country with a complicated history, has imbued her long-term, ongoing portraiture project, Don’t Move Again, with a mission to upend the traditional roles between photographer and subject, rendering her as more of a conduit than a controlling voice.

Pixy Liao’s series, using herself and her boyfriend Moro as the subjects, she challenges expectations, as they explore notions of what is normal in the expression of a romantic bond between a man and a woman.

Sven Marquardt’s selections from his series, Rudel, Marquardt goes beyond the intimidating exteriors of the bouncers who guard the doors of Germany’snightclubs to glimpse their inner workings with the kind of nuanced understanding that only comes with a deep, personal solidarity

Marie Tomanova and her ongoing series, Young American, encompasses a diverse body of young Americans with a raw and penetrating honesty. The side of youth culture that Tomanova represents is a generation not bound by gender conventions. Instead, the young people in her images redefine notions of individuality, identity, and belonging in the American social landscape, epitomizing the isolation and disconnection that nonetheless binds a new generation in their otherness.

ON THE INSIDE: PORTRAITURE THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY

C24 Gallery

Saturday, October 3, 2020 – Thursday, December 24, 2020

More information regarding the exhibition can be found at www.c24gallery.com