1 February - 9 March 2024 : Private views Observed, posed and staged portraits of the intimate sphere
Works by Jo Ann Callis, Jean Curran, Tanya Marcuse, Laura Stevens, Arne Svenson
Exhibition virtual tour
Private Views is the first in a series of four capsule exhibitions that celebrate Galerie Miranda's 6th birthday. Curated across broad themes by gallery founder Miranda Salt, with both new and inventory works, this anniversary cycle reviews the gallery's choices to date and places historical photographic references in conversation with contemporary signatures. Private Views presents distinctive works that broach different aspects of intimacy - beauty, bodies, stereotypes, privacy, desire, love and the end of love - with staged, documented and narrated bodies of work produced from the mid 1970s to today. Shown exclusively and for the first time are selected images by Jean Curran whose hand-made dye-transfer prints are produced from the original Cinemascope reels of Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963) by Jean-Luc Godard and starring Brigitte Bardot.
Biographies of exhibited artists
CALLIS, Jo Ann (1940, USA)
Jo Ann Callis is a photographer based in Los Angeles. After graduating from UCLA she began teaching at CalArts in 1976 and is still a faculty member of the School of Art’s Program in Photography and Media. The subject of over 40 personal exhibitions, her work has been acquired by major private and public collections and exhibited internationally including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2009, the J. Paul Getty Museum presented a retrospective of her work in Los Angeles titled Woman Twirling. Callis has received three NEA Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Works by Jo Ann Callis are presented by Galerie Miranda in friendly collaboration with ROSEGALLERY, Santa Monica.
CURRAN, Jean (1981, Ireland)
Jean Curran is one of a handful of dye-transfer printers working in the world today, and the only artist to be using dye- transfer printing as the basis for her contemporary practice. Curran is interested in the re-contextualisation of early colour films and of re-presenting them as still frame photographic images. The process by which Jean Curran makes her prints is deeply laborious and the time, technical knowledge, and attention that she bestows on each colour print, is similar to a painter or sculptor's practice. Curran’s transformation of movie frames gives us a chance to think about cinema and photography, their technological transitions and the myriad interconnections between film, cinema history, and painting. Her series 'The Vertigo Project', a series of 20 dye-transfer prints taken from the original reel of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) has been exhibited internationally; her latest series Godard/Bardot, 13 dye-transfer prints taken from the original reels of Le Mépris by Jean-Luc Godard, is exhibited for the first time at Galerie Miranda.
MARCUSE, Tanya (1964, USA)
Tanya Marcuse began making photographs as an early college student at Bard College at Simon’s Rock. She went on to study Art History and Studio Art at Oberlin and earned her MFA from Yale. Her photographs are in many collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the George Eastman Museum. In 2002, she received a Guggenheim fellowship to pursue her project Undergarments & Armor. In 2005, she embarked on a three-part, fourteen-year project, Fruitless | Fallen | Woven. Fueled by the Biblical narrative of the fall from Eden, these related projects use increasingly fantastical imagery and more elaborate methods of construction to explore cycles of growth and decay and the dynamic tension between the passage of time and the photographic medium. Tanya’s books include Undergarments and Armor (Nazraeli Press, 2005), Wax Bodies, (Nazraeli Press, 2012), Fruitless | Fallen | Woven (Radius Press, 2019) and INK (Fall Line Press, 2021). She teaches Photography at Bard College, NY.
STEVENS, Laura (1977, UK)
Laura Stevens is a photographer based in Paris. Stevens’ practice lies at the intersection of the female gaze and the personal. Beginning autobiographically, her reflections are translated through the direct act of looking, using figurative and landscape subjects to create still and moving images imbued with a distinct visual tension. She explores the notion of the private space and the interdependency between emotions and environmental surroundings. The relationship between the artist and subject matter is central to her work, using this connection to create studies on solitude, intimacy, loss and longing. Her work has been shown in museums, galleries and festivals internationally and has received many distinctions including that of finalist of the Prix HSBC pour la Photographie in 2019. Her photographs have been published by the British Journal of Photography, Wired, Variety, The Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Libération and Télérama. She received her BA from the Leeds Metropolitan University and her MA from the University of Brighton.
SVENSON, Arne (1952, USA)
Born in Santa Monica (California) and resident of New York City, Arne Svenson has explored numerous and varied photographic subjects and their expression with a consistent underlying quest for the essence and quietude of subjects, whether they be human, inanimate, or something in between. Svenson is a self-taught photographer with an educational and vocational background in special education. His photographs have been shown extensively in the United States and Europe and are included in numerous public and private collections, including SFMOMA, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Carnegie Museum of Art, and Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. He has obtained grants and awards including the Nancy Graves Foundation Grant (2008) and the James D. Phelan Art Award in Photography (2005). In 2016 Svenson received the Nannen Prize for The Neighbors project. He has published several books including Unspeaking Likeness, The Neighbors, Prisoners, and Sock Monkeys (200 out of 1,863) and his work was recently exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (The Neighbors, 2016) and Western Gallery, Western Washington University, Bellingham, Washington (2017).