FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

John Divola:

Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert

October 13 – November 13, 2004

Charles Cowles Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of JOHN DIVOLA's new series Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert. Of this body of work DIVOLA writes:

From 1995 to 1998 I was working on a series of photographs of isolated houses in the desert at the east-end of the Morongo Valley in Southern California. As I meandered through the desert, a dog would occasionally chase my car. Sometime in 1996, I began to bring along a 35mm camera equipped with a motor drive and loaded with a fast and grainy black-and-white film. The process was simple; when I saw a dog coming toward the car I would pre-focus the camera and set the exposure.

Contemplating a dog chasing a car invites any number of metaphors and juxtapositions: culture and nature, the domestic and the wild, love and hate, joy and fear, the heroic and the idiotic. It could be viewed as a visceral and kinetic dance. Here we have two vectors and velocities, that of a dog and that of a car and, seeing that a camera will never capture reality and that a dog will never catch a car, evidence of devotion to a hopeless enterprise.

This exhibition is in conjunction with the release of JOHN DIVOLA's book Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert (Nazraeli Press, 48 pages, 20 duotone plates, $65). It is published as a companion book to the artist’s Isolated Houses and is limited to 1,000 case-bound copies. There will be a book signing for the artist on Friday, October 15, from 6 to 8pm. The gallery will have books available for sale.

JOHN DIVOLA has been professor at the University of California, Riverside since 1988.  Over the last thirty years his work has been featured in more than fifty solo exhibitions in the United States, Japan, Europe, Mexico, and Australia. He was awarded National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in 1973, 1976, 1979, 1990, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1986. His work is included in major public collections including Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; and Centro de Arte de Salamanca, Spain.

The exhibition will be on view at the Charles Cowles Gallery at 537 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues in Chelsea.  Hours are 10am- 6pm, Tuesday through Saturday. 

Above image: Untitled from Dogs chasing my car in the desert (D06F10), Archival pigment on rag paper, 22 x 32" image