Tonight's Opening

Hillyer Art Space at 9 Hillyer Court, NW, has Wundergarten: Sa[l]vaging the Family Archive, a new solo exhibition by local artist Clarke Bedford.

The exhibition opens Friday, April 2, 2010, with a reception from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. featuring a musical set by DJ Neville Chamberlain. $5 suggested donation. The exhibition closes Saturday, May 29, 2010.

Clarke Bedford, a.k.a. F.D. Kalley, William Tecumsah Sherman, Coleslaw Baklava and Professor Benjamin J. Dreadnought PhD, applies his wry humor and assemblage ingenuity to a many-layered body of work in Wundergarten: Sa[l]vaging the Family Archive. Combining a wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosities) and winter garden, Bedford’s installation plumbs the history of vernacular photography while framing the chronicle of an American “every-family” through the found archives of an actual family.

In the artist’s own words:

The found objects in the installation – assembled into garden furniture, a generational colonnade, frames and props – are intended to provide a memorial setting for the photographs and to work as an object-based corollary to them. The photographs themselves also serve as a kind of history of snapshot-photography: the sequence of forms from the early 20th-century box camera prints mounted in black page albums with white lettering, through 35 mm black and whites, early color, Polaroid, Instamatic-type square prints with textured surfaces and so on.

The generations depicted are the same as my own – WW1 generation grandparents, WW11 parents, and baby-boomer self. Consequently, the images seem very familiar, almost personal. One begins to wonder if every snapshot of grandparents in a Model A Ford in Yosemite National Park, every image of a postwar father in an Army uniform, every mother in a ‘50s suburban kitchen, every painful Vietnam-era Christmas morning isn’t essentially the same.

Clarke Bedford has exhibited and performed his difficult-to-categorize work in the Washington, DC, and New York areas at venues ranging from the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Hemphill Fine Arts and Kreeger Museum to many universities and academic conferences. His day job entails interaction with the very post-modern art he mocks, as Conservator of Paintings and Mixed-Media Objects at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. He received a B.A. in ’69 from Williams College and M.A. in ’80 from the Cooperstown Graduate Programs in Art Conservation.