Gallery Two, Chicago
Western Exhibitions presents their first solo show with Ken Fandell featuring a new series of elegant collages.
Much of his work for the past ten years has featured elements of collage or montage. For the past few years Fandell has been utilizing a traditional cut and paste process in much of his work, spurred on by a move to California, a return to surfing, and contemplation of his own mortality. This new body of work stems from Fandell’s conflation of corporeal concerns, along with a renewed appreciation for earth and ground, thoughts about the landscape around him and his own body. A History of Landscape Photography course he teaches also forced him to rigorously revisit Edward Weston’s work.
The source materials for the Figures (Weston) series are taken from a single monograph on Weston, and the Figures (Weston-Cunningham) series from single monographs on Weston and Imogen Cunningham, respectively. In each collage, Fandell combines a figurative image with one of the landscape or natural flora or fauna found within it; the images spliced together by one cut. Although Fandell shares an interest in Weston’s aesthetic and attitude towards beauty, ultimately his collages have more in common with the mutants of early Dada and Surrealism than Weston’s polished modernism.
Ken Fandell has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally, with exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, the University of Delaware, the Asheville Museum of Art, and the Houston Center for Photography. His work is included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York and is currently hanging in the U.S. Embassy in Bulgaria. He has received prestigious awards from The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and Artadia. Formerly based in Chicago, he lives and works in Los Angeles and is the Michael G. and C. Jane Wilson Chair in the Arts and Humanities at Harvey Mudd College.