Exhibition runs:
Friday, November 13, 2009 - December 19, 2009

Opening reception:
Friday, November 13, 2009 - 7pm to 9pm

Civilian Art Projects presents Woods, an exhibition of new photography by acclaimed artist Terri Weifenbach. The exhibition will open in Civilian’s new space at 1019 7th Street NW on Friday, November 13, 2009 and will be on view until December 19, 2009.

The opening reception for the artist is on Friday, November 13, 2009 from 7pm to 9pm.

For over two decades, Terri Weifenbach has enjoyed an admired, international career as a fine art photographer. She has published nine books of photography and exhibited widely in Japan, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States. Woods, her first solo exhibition in seven years in Washington, is a new series of photographs taken within the woods of the DC metro area. "Attracted by line, mass, and sheer density of information, I went to the woods. Attracted to the idea of making that information dynamically equal through the flattened plane of the photograph, I stood inside those woods and recorded," says Weifenbach.

According to writer Gareth Branwyn who penned the essay for the exhibition:

In the science of human perception, figure-ground relationships are a key to visual awareness. We see a differentiated world because a thing is rendered distinct from everything else. It is the edges of things, where they interact with the rest of the world (i.e. “the background”), where our perception occurs. Our eyeballs actually make little micro-movements, constantly comparing thing to non-thing, figure to ground, so that we can perceive and organize the objects within our visual field.

This dynamic relationship, between figure and ground, has always been a persistent theme in Terri Weifenbach's work. Her photographs unapologetically challenge our everyday visual awareness, provoking the normal conduct of the eye to quickly and categorically assess the visual information we take in. Using narrow depth of field, selective focus, forced perspective, and other techniques, she's confidently taken photography to a place that is both familiar and strange, a realm somewhere between painting and photography. Her work attempts to employ color, line and other terms of the photographer's vocabulary, while conveying the energy of abstract expressionist painting. In executing this work, she's always intent to not pull away from the subject completely, while still working in an expressionist domain.

Weifenbach’s work has been published in Japanese Esquire, Audubon, the New Yorker as an illustration for “Personal Archeology” by John Updike, and Phaidon’s The Photobook: A History volume II by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger. It is in the collections of Museum Ludwig, Koln, Germany; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, CA; Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ; Sprengel Museum Hanover, Hanover, Germany; and several private collections including that of Elton John and Sophia Coppola. Her most recent solo exhibitions were at the Blitz International Galleries in Nagoya and Tokyo, Japan in 2008. Her most recent book Another Summer was published by The Thunderstorm Press in October 2009. Other books include In Your Dreams, Hunter Green, Instruction Manual No. 2 and 3 (Nazraeli Press); Snake Eyes (with John Gossage) (Loosestrife Editions); and Politics of Flowers (onestar press).

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November 13 - December 19, 2009

Opening reception: Friday, November 13, 7-9pm

Woods, Terri Weifenbach's first solo exhibition in seven years in Washington, is a new series of photographs taken within the woods of the DC metro area. "Attracted by line, mass, and sheer density of information, I went to the woods. Attracted to the idea of making that information dynamically equal through the flattened plane of the photograph, I stood inside those woods and recorded," says Weifenbach.