FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Regen Projects
629 North Almont Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90069
Tel. (310) 276-5424
Fax. (310) 276-7430



DAVID ARMSTRONG, STEPHEN BARKER, CRAIGIE HORSFIELD
May 9th - June 10th, 1995
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 11:00-5:00



Regen Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of black and white photographs by David Armstrong, Stephen Barker and Craigie Horsfield. Each approaching subject matter, photography, and information in different manners, the artists on view consistently explore memory and loss through the black and white medium.

David Armstrong, a New York based photographer, is primarily known for his portraits, now on view at the Whitney Biennial. The landscapes currently on view at Regen Projects, which were taken between 1992 and 1994 in Europe and eastern Europe, are lush, out of focus renderings of architectural details and idyllic pastoral scenes. The focusing on roccoco details from Vienna, Versailles or Berlin become nostalgic meditations on a static foregone excess--evoking a brooding, almost tarnished beauty, measuring the present from the past in dark hues.
In the landscapes, the classical considerations of Armstrong's portraits become more discernible, suggestive of master painting from Corot to Richter's blurred landscape paintings.

Stephen Barker's "Nightswimming, NYC" series from 1993-94 were photographed with high-speed film and without a flash in gay video theaters throughout New York. The photographs are once again enigmatic, dark, almost indiscernible images which fade into black. Barker's method, which obscures the subject matter, moves into a near religious beauty: cigarette smoke looks other worldly, and amorous poses often echo the Pieta.

Craigie Horsfield, a London-based photographer, makes large scale photographs distilled from his personal history. The photos often carry two dates, a record of when the photograph was taken, and when the photograph was enlarged and printed. Sometimes spanning more than a decade, historical dislocation figures prominently into his work. The photos are mounted, so that no plexi or glass covers the surface, the photograph itself being the skin. The quality of the work is such that on close inspection it seems that the photograph is drawn, as a perfect rendering of an abandoned street, a close-up portrait of a friend, a man's shoe. Although Horsfield's photographs stem from a more theoretical impetus, it's impossible not to read a controlled melancholy into the historical dislocation, or the exaggerated blacks of his abandoned spaces. As a European photographer, Horsfield's praxis is one of the more challenging and resonant of his contemporaries (worldwide). His work was seen in Los Angeles in 1991 at MoCA as part of "A Dialogue About Recent American and European Photography," co-curated by Ann Goldstein and Jean-Francois Chevrier.


For further information please contact Shaun Caley, Stuart Regen or Chip Tom at the gallery.