Justine Kurland

January 18 - April 6, 2003


Justine Kurland
Amarillas Belladonna (detail), 2002, c-print, 22 1/4 x 29 1/2”, Courtesy of the Artist and Gorney, Bravin + Lee Gallery, New York
The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at the University of Pennsylvania is pleased to present the photographs of Justine Kurland. Presented in the ICA's Project Space, this exhibition continues the museum's tradition of exhibiting the work of talented emerging artists.

Justine Kurland's photographs are about adolescence, awkwardness, girls, the American landscape, secrets, and quiet, private dreams of community that hide behind tough exteriors and blank faces. Relatively large-scale, and often theatrically staged, Kurland's images position their subjects hanging out together in forsaken corners of forgotten fields, forests, highway underpasses, lakes and beaches. Her landscapes and her figures are analogies of each other, in-between spaces where identity and function have not yet been fixed or have begun to slip ambiguously into freedom. Recent work considers community more generally, focusing on present-day communes and people united by a choice to live "off-the-grid."

Justine Kurland
Wood Song, 2002, Toned gelatin silver print, 14 1/4 x 18”, Courtesy of the artist and Gorney, Bravin + Lee, New York

Kurland (b. in 1969, Warsaw, NY, lives and works in New York) has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe. Recent exhibitions include one-person shows at The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago and Gorney Bravin + Lee, NY. This exhibition is organized by Bennett Simpson, ICA Associate Curator. The Opening Reception, which is free and open to the public, is scheduled for Friday, January 17, 2003 from 6:00 to 8:00 pm. An Exhibition walkthrough, led by Justine Kurland and Bennett Simpson, will take place on Friday, January 17 at 4:30pm.