KERRY SKARBAKKA & MARLA RUTHERFORD: RE-PRESENTING THE PORTRAIT

Irvine Contemporary presents Two Concurrent Solo Exhibitions
June 30 -August 4, 2007
Opening Reception: Saturday June 30, 6-8 PM

Irvine Contemporary announces an exhibition of new and recent photographs by internationally acclaimed artists Kerry Skarbakka and Marla Rutherford. Both artists are working at a vitally significant intersection of approaches to the photographic image today: performative photography, staged and provocative hyperreal fictions, and new approaches the to photographic portrait. An essay by photography collector Henry Thaggert will accompany the exhibition.

In the series The Struggle to Right Oneself, Kerry Skarbakka stages himself in scenes of losing balance and control. His arresting photographs appear at the intersection of performance and artist's portraits, and each composition dramatizes one of the deepest themes of our moment--the sense losing balance and control both personally and socially. The photographs are actual shots of the artist in the scene with only the minimal rigging and wires used for the shot removed from the final print. The photographs also record a deep sense of risk-taking and often physical danger for the artist, who has taken falls and created physically demanding sets in the search of the right arresting image. Skarbakka extended this theme further in the performances commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2005, Life Goes On.

Marla Rutherford’s work references many genres of photography—fashion, advertising, glamour portrait, fetish, film stills, Pirelli Calendars—to present highly original fictional and performative portraits that play off incongruous worlds, often interrupting a domestic scene with a fantasy image or placing a seductive fetish portrait in a commonplace, everyday scene. Marla Rutherford’s work is now in the traveling museum exhibition, reGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow, which was organized by the curators at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland. The exhibition was launched in the US at the Aperture gallery in New York, and Aperture Press has published the exhibition catalogue, reGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow.

Robert Mellor: New Scenarios Through Wednesday, June 27

IRVINE CONTEMPORARY
1412 14th St ., NW, Washington, DC 20005
www.irvinecontemporary.com
(202) 332-8767
info@irvinecontemporary.com
Gallery Hours: Tues. - Sat. 11-6 pm, and by appointment