Skin Seen Press Release

"SKIN and SEEN"
Richard Edson and Heide Hatry
FEBRUARY 17th – MARCH 18th 2006
OPENING RECEPTION FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17TH, 7PM


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Los Angeles: ADM Project Gallery and Media Arts Collective is elated to announce "SKIN and SEEN", a two-person show introducing photographic and tactile works by Richard Edson and Heide Hatry. This two-person show is intended to welcome these nearly diametrically opposed artists and aesthetics to ADM Project and is a preview of their upcoming and larger one-person touring shows.

Richard Edson unveils a preview of large, lush, monumental photographs printed in huge museum format, selected from his upcoming book SEEN and UNSEEN, folio series. Edson’s images are classic narrative scenes scoped out with a dark and humorous eye, sometimes voyeuristic, sometimes compassionate and humanist and at times achieving a kind of impish wink at the mythic, all shot in beautiful black and white real film. At turns, the images are provocative and sensual and at others, invoking a subtle wit and sharp sense of momentary narrative, all seen with a graceful and mature charm, rare these days for its deceptive modesty and deftly handled humor. With an easy worldliness and classically composed visual sensibility, Edson seeks out the epic and transcendent moments in the everyday and hones in on the dreamy human mechanisms usually gone unseen behind the scenes of our theatrical illusions, gathering and working them into freeze frames from a sort of modern day black and white zen-noir movie.

Richard Edson continues to act and has starred in over sixty films including Jim Jarmusch's, Stranger Then Paradise, Spike Lee's, Do the Right Thing, and Wim Wender's, Land of Plenty. He is also a musician. He was the first drummer of Sonic Youth and a member of the seminal NYC afro-funk band, Konk. He continues to play a unique blend of underground jazz and afro-funk with his own group, Oil Can. A camera constantly at his side, Edson's body of photowork is enriched by a diverse life which fulfills the usually unfulfilled mantra of, "I wish I had a camera."

Finally garnering the attention he deserves as an artist, Richard Edson, will enter a canon of great photographers, with a truly classic and beautiful photography book, SEEN, which will be produced under the careful editorial eye of Brian Ray Turcotte’s imprint, “Kill Your Idols”. The book will also include writings by preeminent photography writer, Luc Sante and Pulitzer Prize winning photographer, Clarence Williams. Limited edition folio boxes, entitled Unseen, published by Atelier Deluxe Musíque, and the huge, museum sized, sumptuous, limited edition prints will be available for signing at the receptions or by appointment.

Richard Edson will be available for private tours and interviews by appointment or around both the opening preview reception, on Friday, February 17th, at 7 PM and at a special evening with the artist open to the public on Thursday March 16th at 7PM.

The second artist in this two-person preview show is Heide Hatry, a New York based artist from Berlin. Hatry's book SKIN features the work of seven different women artists, all-working on the theme of skin in a variety of mythical and literal vehicles. In particular, pigskin was chosen as a primary material because of its tactile and visual relation to human skin. With recent shows in museums and galleries in New York, Berlin and Heidelberg, Heide Hatry is building up to a one-woman show tour of installation, performance, tactilia and persona manifestations in her beautiful and deceptively shocking, yet sensitively complex book, Skin. Working in their own right and ontology, the different artists appearing in Skin have gained their own shows and separate mythologies in multiple international arenas.

Hatry's appearance in this two-person show is just a glimpse of the work in her upcoming one-person show, revealing the full scope and magnitude of a quickly rising career. Gaining the attention of Michael J. Amy (Art in America, NY Times) and working with a variety of noted authors including Hans Gercke and Ethnologist, Elsbeth Sachs, Hatry's work is in fine company and gaining a growing circle of literary and international curatorial attention. With over 15 years experience as a painter and instructor in the arts, and her toiling to bring this recent body of work out of an intense shift in her personal life, Hatry has more than paid her entry dues into the art world and in the last several years has built up to this beautiful, shocking and ingenious body of work which explores, gouges, sews, dries, sculpts, molds, paints and penetrates the physiological, social, psychological, material, semiological and mythic qualities of skin.

Hatry's exhibition coincides with a solo exhibition at the Goethe Institut in New York 8 March 2006. At ADM Hatry will also be doing an on-site construction of "FLAG", a tactile skin work, which appears on the attached visual promo material and in our full-page ad in the March issue of Modern Painters magazine. Also, a special evening with Heide Hatry is planned for Thursday March 23rd at 7:00pm the event is geared for press, curators, and collectors, but opened to the general public.
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For press and curatorial information, contact Victor Sheely Morales at: www.admproject.com (323) 275-8725, victor@admproject.com