LOIS CONNER
READING LANDSCAPES

2 November - 14 December 2014
ARTIST RECEPTION: Thursday November 13th, 6-8PM
M97 PROJECT SPACE: 170 Yueyang Road No.1 Bldg 3 #102

M97 Gallery is pleased to present “READING LANDSCAPES”, an exhibition of platinum photographs by New York-based artist Lois Conner. Having worked in China for much of the past 30 years, this will be Lois Conner’s first gallery exhibition in Shanghai. There will be a reception for the artist on November 13th from 6-8PM at the Yueyang Road M97 Project Space.

Since graduating from the MFA Photography Program at Yale University in 1981, Lois Conner’s artistic practice has been concentrated on depicting landscapes and their changing faces. In the last quarter of a century, the New York-based photographer has spent much of her time working in Asia, mainly in China and Vietnam.

The current exhibition, ”Reading Landscapes”, focuses on a reoccurring thread in Conner’s work, the lotus. Over the past 30 years of travel in China, the photographer’s depiction of the water plants makes them at once ethereal and earthbound. There emerges from her lyrical photographs a poetic balance of bloom and decay, and a strong visual dynamism between force, fluidity and fate. The lotus portrayed in Conner’s photographs becomes an almost anthropomorphic character poised in the endless circle of life, death and rebirth.

From the beginning of her career, Lois Conner adopted an apparatus of nineteen-century photography called the “banquet camera”, which produces a 7”x17” negative. This panoramic view camera was originally designed for photographing large groups of people. In her work, the long rectangle film format holds a narrative power, allowing the viewer’s attention to move through the image from one side to the other, in a way very similar to the scroll painting’s linear story. Going back to Conner’s earliest photographs, one can see the profound influence of scroll paintings with their images of fantastical landscapes. Conner’s negatives are often printed on a heavyweight tracing vellum. All the photographs are hand-printed by the artist in her New York studio employing the platinum and palladium photographic printing process, which yields warmer grays and a wider range of tones than the silver gelatin process.

“My intention has never been to emulate paintings or other art, rather to respond and assimilate. I've spent a lot of time at Yuanming Yuan in Beijing and in Hangzhou photographing lotus while also working on other projects. I never know what I will find. Each day brings thrilling discoveries as well as inevitable frustrations and disappointment. But the lotus has become my muse. And it subsequently informs how I approach other landscapes.”

October 2014 marks the 30th anniversary of Lois Conner’s first photographic trip to China. To celebrate this event, the M97 Gallery will exhibit various works illustrating not only the landscapes that have fascinated the photographer, but also the changes she has witnessed in three decades of intense travelling throughout the country.

Lois Conner was born in 1951 in Pennsylvania, in the United States. She studied photography, first undergraduate studies at the Pratt Institute in New York, and later in the Photography MFA Program at Yale University. While studying photography at Yale, Conner was introduced to both the Chinese scroll painting and its cinematic narration, and to the landscapes of southern China. Both strongly influenced her later photographic practice, even until today.

Her work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group shows in prestigious institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum and the MoMA in New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Conner's photographs are held in numerous important museum collections, including, besides the aforementioned three museums, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Australian National Gallery, among many others.

RECENT MEDIA COVERAGE | NEW YORK TIMES, 5.21.2014 | FINANCIAL TIMES, 10.25.2014

LINKS
>> Exhibition URL
>> Lois Conner artist page