On view:
April 22 – June 4, 2011

Opening reception for the artist:
Friday, April 22, 7-9pm

Exhibition hours:
Wednesday, Thursday & Saturday 1-6pm.

Civilian Art Projects is pleased to announce Woods II, new work by renowned photographer Terri Weifenbach. Her second solo exhibition with the gallery continues the Woods project with twenty-one large and small scale images from within the autumn and winter woods of the DC metro area.

Before she picked up her Leica camera 33 years ago, Weifenbach was first trained as a painter. According to the artist, she has always been drawn to the layering of surface and the sumptuous accumulation of material found in painting. On occasion, she has contemplated Cecily Brown's brushstroke with deep understanding and curiosity. It is no surprise, then, that Weifenbach's photographic work embraces the tactile nature of non-photographic mediums.

According to curator Phyllis Rosenzweig, who penned the essay "Terri Weifenbach: Photography and Painting" for the exhibition: "Before she became a photographer Terri Weifenbach studied painting, and her sense of the distinctions between the two practices informs the work in this exhibition. For her, painting is a process in which you 'build your ideas, concepts and world,' while photography is one of editing: '[you] edit the world with the camera frame, edit the images from a contact sheet, confine and edit to define your ideas, concept and world.'"

Weifenbach, a skilled artist and printer, understands the limits of photographic technology and, through focus, metering, depth of field, vantage point, film selection, printing strategies, and other more intuitive decisions, plays with and pushes them. She is, in short, a master of her craft; and her selection of what may seem a familiar scene of a walk in the woods is transformed through her skill into a deeper examination of space, palette, and the growth and morphing of nature. These are not accidental shots.

Just as a painter cannot make a single brushstroke and call the work complete, Weifenbach cannot click a shutter and call it a photograph. Photographic projects of this nature take months, years; perhaps even a lifetime. One image lends weight and strength to the next, but each must be able to hold its own as a work of art.

Rosenzweig continues: "Her previous exhibition at Civilian Art Projects consisted of images of the same or similar woods as seen here. The emphasis in that show, as in much of her previous work, was on verticality. Not all, but most, of the images in this exhibition emphasize the horizontal – what we refer to as a landscape, or panoramic, mode (vs. the vertical "portrait" format). This format broadens the surface, further diffusing the surface space, and therefore makes it even more difficult to find a stable or precise point on which to focus - - much like the experience of looking at Jackson Pollock's Lavender Mist or a broad swathe of canvas irregularly interrupted by vertical zips in a Barnett Newman painting."

Weifenbach's work has been published most recently in the 2011 Le Monde D'Hermes Spring-Summer issue. It was selected by Peter Saville, acclaimed designer and co-founder of the legendary Factory Records in Manchester, for inclusion in the Hermes magazine as the central photographic essay. She has published ten books of photography and exhibited widely in Japan, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States. Her work appears 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. Her work is in numerous collections, including the 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.

Her most recent solo exhibitions were at the Blitz International Galleries in Nagoya and Tokyo, Japan in 2008 and PhotoEye in Tuscon, AZ in 2010. Her books include Another Summer (The Thunderstorm Press), 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). Between Maple and Chestnut is forthcoming from Nazraeli press.

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April 22 – June 4, 2011

Opening Reception: Friday, April 22, 7-9pm

Civilian Art Projects is pleased to announce Woods II, new work by renowned photographer Terri Weifenbach. Her second solo exhibition with the gallery continues the Woods project with twenty-one large and small scale images from within the autumn and winter woods of the DC metro area.