CURRENT EXHIBITION

WE SHOW HERE, DECEMBER 1 – 24, 2016

Cara Barer  Elaine Duigenan  Odette England  Max de Esteban  Cornelia Hediger

Matthew-Robert Hughes  Doug Keyes  Sarah Lynch  Robert Moran

Jim Naughten  Helen Sear  Vojtech V. Slama  Frederic Weber

During the month of December, and leading up to the Christmas and New Year holidays, we are exhibiting a wonderfully diverse selection of contemporary photographs. Each of the artworks are small to medium-sized, framed and ready to be taken away. The perfect 'gift of art'. 

If you don't see what you're looking for on the gallery walls, let us know! We'll dive into the gallery inventory and help you to find the perfect artwork. 

The gallery has artworks ranging in values from $300 through to $68,000. So, whatever your budget, we're pretty certain we have you covered.

Each Saturday, we'll also be offering some special sales, on both artworks and photobooks. These offers will be limited to those specific days, and collectors will be alerted via the Gallery Newsletter. If you're not on our mailing list, you can SIGN UP HERE.

ODETTE ENGLAND: NEW WORK RELEASED

We are delighted to make available, a new body of work by Odette England. If this work is of interested to collectors, we urge a prompt purchase. There are a total of just twelve photographs in the series, available in just one limited edition of 1 + 1 AP, with the artist proof retained by the artist. 

Ruffled (2014-2015) © Odette England

With Remarks About My Body, Odette England explores the notion that ‘we are what we wear’, and the psychology of dress. The photographs reference the changes the artist experienced in her body—and with wider priorities—through motherhood.

Tight (left) and Apex (right) © Odette England

“Clothing affects perception, and putting on different clothes can dramatically change mood”, says England. “The negative space is just that—the space of my body now, variants in skin tone and texture.  In some ways I was what I wore but am no longer.  My body has become more flesh-like and abstract and there are things, physical and emotional, that no longer fit”.

Remarks About My Body is informed by the research of Professors Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky, whose paper 'Enclothed Cognition’, discusses the systematic influence that clothes have on the wearer's psychological processes [used with kind permission].

Remarks About My Body is available as follows:

Size: 15" x 20" image | 17" x 22" sheet
Edition: 1 + 1AP
Medium: Archival Pigment Print

Signed, titled, numbered and dated on verso

Current Retail Value: $3,000 USD

To obtain a PDF Catalogue of the complete series, please EMAIL the gallery,
or contact Debra Klomp Ching on +1 212 796 2070.

View 'Remarks About My Body' on the gallery ARTSY profile.
 

ARTIST TALK – ODETTE ENGLAND

Saturday, November 19th, 4pm

Please join us on Saturday, November 19th, for an artist talk to be given by Odette England, on the final day of her solo exhibition, Excavations. 

"Preserving family history via photography is like archaeology: it involves the exposure, processing and recording of remains. But to uncover the truth of an image – or at least an interpretation of a truth – a ‘hunt’ or ‘dig’ is required. 

'Excavations' explores the invisible social space of family storytelling through photography. I make c-prints in the darkroom of family pictures from expired Kodak film, as well as using original snapshots from the album, then carefully hand-sand them with various types of sandpaper. I aim to loosen the complexities of material encounter with intangible concepts. Mine is also a literal assault. I cross into taboo territory, the transgression and squeamish horror of destroying original personal possessions".—Odette England

UPCOMING EXHIBITION

ODETTE ENGLAND: EXCAVATIONS
October 8 – November 19, 2016

KLOMPCHING GALLERY is delighted to present Excavations—a collection of new photographs by Odette England. Excavations was premiered at the AIPAD Photography Fair in New New York in April 2016, and we are now pleased to be showcasing the full breadth of the series.

Please join us the Opening Reception on Saturday, October 8, 6pm–8pm.
We hope you can make it, and we look forward to seeing you.

Excavation, No. 3 (2015)

Home is the center-weight of Odette England’s artistic practice, with memory and forgetting being the counterbalances. Her photographs are fragile, contemplative and temporal spaces. Throughout her practice, she works with expired film, vintage cameras, damaged negatives and alternative photo processes; exploring volatility of identity, emphasizing the unstable nature of the past/present and the parent/child seesaw. These overall themes continue to be examined with Excavations, which utilizes historical photographs from the artist’s family archive.

The 18 color photographs presented in the exhibition, are one-of-a-kind and unique, having undergone a meticulous and labor-intensive process of being partially erased and obscured. This process of manual manipulation, is evidenced by the trace of the artist’s hand—gestures in the form of lines, sweeping arches and circular movements, through to dense areas of almost total obliteration of the original image. Across the artworks, this stripping away of visual information is carefully balanced with glimpses of substantive visual clues—a sitting figure, a landscape vista, a tree or lamp-post. 

“Preserving family history via photography is like archaeology: it involves the exposure, processing and recording of remains. But to uncover the truth of an image – or at least an interpretation of a truth – a ‘hunt’ or ‘dig’ is required. Excavationsexplores the invisible social space of family storytelling through photography. I make c-prints in the darkroom of family pictures from expired Kodak film, as well as using original snapshots from the album, then carefully hand-sand them with various types of sandpaper. I aim to loosen the complexities of material encounter with intangible concepts. Mine is also a literal assault. I cross into taboo territory, the transgression and squeamish horror of destroying original personal possessions”.—Odette England

Diffidence, 2015

  

In addition to the manipulation of the photographic surface, scale and format is a key element of this series. With some of the artworks, England has re-presented the photographs as enlarged contemporary pigment prints and squared-off, thus situating the subject outside of its original context and intention. Alongside these, original vintage c-type snapshots are presented in deep-set boxes, maintaining the intimacy of the family album, but clearly contextualized as museum-like artifacts.

Excavations is a thought-provoking body of work that is meticulously made, both in terms of physical execution and conceptual vision. These are quiet, meditative artworks, incorporating elements of abstraction, preservation of history and nostalgia, together with an active and critical comment on the malleability of the photograph, which runs counter to its continued link to truth and reality.

Odette England (b.1975) is an Australian/British artist, whose artwork has been exhibited across the US and internationally. Awards and accolades include winning the 2012 CENTER Project Launch Award, shortlisted for the 2015 Australian Photo Book Of The Year, Finalist for the 2015 Cliftons Art Prize (Asia Pacific region), and more recently shortlisted for the prestigious 2016 Josephine Ulrick & Win Schubert Photography Award (Australia). Collections holding her work include the George Eastman Museum, New Mexico Museum of Art and MoCP. Odette England lives and works in Rhode Island, US.

ODETTE ENGLAND: AWARD FINALIST

We are delighted to announce that gallery artist, Odette England, has been shortlisted for the prestigious 2016 Josephine Ulrick & Win Schubert Award. 

Forty-five finalists were selected by Professor Susan Best, Program Convenor of Fine Art and Art Theory, Griffith University's Queensland College of Art. An exhibition of the finalists will take place at The Arts Center Gold Coast, June 25–August 21, 2016. The award offers a first prize of $20,000 and acquisition prizes totaling $10,000. 

Odette England was selected with work from the newly-released series Excavations, which the gallery premiered at the AIPAD Photography Show in April 2016. A solo exhibition of work by Odette England is scheduled for September. 

Image: © Odette England

AIPAD 2016: ODETTE ENGLAND

Excavation No. 8, 2015

Series Title: Excavations

Number of artworks at AIPAD: 2

Edition: 1/1 + 1AP

Size: 18.5"x18.5" image on 22.5"x22.5" sheet

Medium: Unique Archival Pigment Print, scratched with sandpaper

Year: 2015

"Preserving family history via photography is like an archeological excavation: it involves the exposure, processing and recording of remains. But to uncover the truth – or at least an interpretation of the ‘apparent truth’ of an image – a ‘hunt’ or ‘dig’ is required.

My project Excavations explores the invisible social space of family storytelling. I make chromogenic color prints (in the darkroom) of family photographs using vintage Kodak film, as well as using snapshots from the album, and then carefully hand-sand them with various types and grades of sandpaper. Using sandpaper means I can blur detail, smooth areas, roughen up patches, and remove people or landscapes altogether…in other words, grind and polish my past, present, future. I make the importance of the snapshot as a memory-based object more beguiling. New stories emerge through interaction, transforming presence into symbolic absence.

The new images challenge how past events are re-presented to us through imagery and how these can influence what we think and believe."–Odette England.

Develop Before 07/1991 (Kodacolor Gold 200 12),  2014-2015

Series Title: Develop Before

Number of Artworks at AIPAD: 1

Edition: 3 + 1AP

Size: 20"x20" image on 24x24" sheet

Medium: Archival Pigment Print

Year: 2014–2015

Home is the center-weight of Odette England's artistic practice, with memory and forgetting being the counterbalances. Her photographs are fragile, contemplative and temporal spaces. She works with expired film, vintage cameras, damaged negatives and alternative photo processes; exploring the volatility of identity, emphasizing the unstable nature of the past/present and the parent/child seesaw.

The Develop Before series continues these overall themes. 

"Grandpa was a collector – matchboxes, bird’s eggs, seeds, postcards – but one of his most curious collections comprised old Kodak 126 film boxes, each neatly unfolded, held together in a stack with a thin rubber band and placed inside a worn, faded green plastic bag hidden in the back of a freezer.  On the outside of each box, where Kodak had printed 'Develop Before' together with the film’s expiry date (a practice that dates from the end of the 19th century) Grandpa had circled the date in red pen, as if to ensure that the snapshots he took would be revealed at their very best and 'freshest'.

What struck me wasn’t that the boxes themselves had expired, but that they were simultaneously the same and different, much like family snapshots.  There is homogeneity to how we make snapshots the world over, both in terms of subject matter and our behaviour (as subjects ourselves) in front of the lens.  Grandpa's boxes have their own unique marks of age – wrinkles, scars, stains, bruises – things we tend to avoid in family photography.  They were also never intended to be subjects of photography: boxes are simply trash – nothing of value, though to Grandpa, worth something.  I was compelled to photograph them, using a heavily modified Kodak Instamatic, expired photography chemicals and a scanner."—Odette England

Collections holding the work of Odette England include the New Mexico Museum of Art (Santa Fe), George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film (Syracuse) and the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago).

FIRST RELEASE OF NEW IMAGES

ODETTE ENGLAND: EXCAVATIONS
FIRST RELEASE OF NEW IMAGES

KLOMPCHING GALLERY is delighted to release the first three images from Odette England's new series, Excavations.

"Preserving family history via photography is like an archeological excavation: it involves the exposure, processing and recording of remains. But to uncover the truth – or at least an interpretation of the ‘apparent truth’ of an image – a ‘hunt’ or ‘dig’ is required.

My project 'Excavations' explores the invisible social space of family storytelling. I make chromogenic color prints (in the darkroom) of family photographs using vintage Kodak film, as well as using snapshots from the album, and then carefully hand-sand them with various types and grades of sandpaper. Using sandpaper means I can blur detail, smooth areas, roughen up patches, and remove people or landscapes altogether…in other words, grind and polish my past, present, future. I make the importance of the snapshot as a memory-based object more beguiling. New stories emerge through interaction, transforming presence into symbolic absence.

The new images challenge how past events are re-presented to us through imagery and how these can influence what we think and believe."–Odette England

Excavation No. 6, 2015

Excavation No. 33, 2015

Excavation No. 59, 2015

The Excavation series is available as follows:

Size: 18.5"x18.5" image on 22.5"x22.5" sheet
Unique archival pigment prints, hand-sanded with sandpaper
Signed, titled and dated via label

Pricing and further information available from:

Debra Klomp Ching on +1 212 796 2070

AIPAD 2015: ODETTE ENGLAND

Develop Before 07/1991 (Kodacolor Gold 200 12),  2014-2015

Series Title: Develop Before

Number of Artworks at AIPAD: 5

Edition: 3 + 1AP

Size: 20"x20" image on 24x24" sheet

Medium: Archival Pigment Print

Year: 2014–2015

Home is the center-weight of Odette England's artistic practice, with memory and forgetting being the counterbalances. Her photographs are fragile, contemplative and temporal spaces. She works with expired film, vintage cameras, damaged negatives and alternative photo processes; exploring the volatility of identity, emphasizing the unstable nature of the past/present and the parent/child seesaw.

The Develop Before series continues these overall themes. Completed 2014–2015, this series of twelve photographs is newly released to the market, with their exhibition at AIPAD 2015, being their first-time showing. 

"Grandpa was a collector – matchboxes, bird’s eggs, seeds, postcards – but one of his most curious collections comprised old Kodak 126 film boxes, each neatly unfolded, held together in a stack with a thin rubber band and placed inside a worn, faded green plastic bag hidden in the back of a freezer.  On the outside of each box, where Kodak had printed 'Develop Before' together with the film’s expiry date (a practice that dates from the end of the 19th century) Grandpa had circled the date in red pen, as if to ensure that the snapshots he took would be revealed at their very best and 'freshest'.

What struck me wasn’t that the boxes themselves had expired, but that they were simultaneously the same and different, much like family snapshots.  There is homogeneity to how we make snapshots the world over, both in terms of subject matter and our behaviour (as subjects ourselves) in front of the lens.  Grandpa's boxes have their own unique marks of age – wrinkles, scars, stains, bruises – things we tend to avoid in family photography.  They were also never intended to be subjects of photography: boxes are simply trash – nothing of value, though to Grandpa, worth something.  I was compelled to photograph them, using a heavily modified Kodak Instamatic, expired photography chemicals and a scanner."—Odette England

Collections holding the work of Odette England include the New Mexico Museum of Art (Santa Fe), George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film (Syracuse) and the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago).

ODETTE ENGLAND: MULTI-AWARD FINALIST

Congratulations to gallery artist, Odette England, on being named a Finalist for the following prestigious awards.

2014 Sunshine Coast Art Prize for the Thrice Upon A Time series. It awards a $15,000 prize, with an accompanying exhibition for finalists at the Caloundra Regional Gallery (Australia), August 7–October 26, 2014.

2014 IRIS Award for Self Diagnosis series. The award is managed by the Perth Center for Photography (Australia), provides a $4,000 prize, and an exhibition of finalists ran May 9–June 8, 2014.

2014 DUO Magazine Percival Photographic Portrait Prize. Nominated for the Self Diagnosis series. The award provides a $10,000 prize, and an exhibition of finalists is currently showing at the Pinnacles Gallery, Townsville (Australia), through July 13, 2014.

Selected for the10th Anniversary publication of Flash Forward by the Magenta Foundation (Canada). Featuring the Top 100 list of photographers from Canada, the UK and the US. Self Diagnosis, VII (2011) © Odette England 6.5" x 9.3" image on 8.5" x 11" sheet,  Edition: 3 + 1AP

ODETTE ENGLAND: MUSEUM ACQUISITION

It's with much pleasure that we can announce the acquisition of work from the Thrice Upon A Time series (below), by the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP) in Chicago. This follows on from the photographic series, being included in the museum's recent and critically admired Of Walking exhibition.

Mum #3 (Right Foot), 2012 © Odette England

ODETTE ENGLAND: George Eastman House

Of Time and Buildings

March 8 – June 8, 2014

We're pleased to share the news, that a selection of photographs from Odette England's Thrice Upon a Time series, acquired by the George Eastman House in 2013, have been curated into the exhibition Of Time and Buildings.

The exhibition was curated by Alison Nordström – Senior Curator of the George Eastman House, 2004-2013. Read our previous blog post about the museum's acquisition of England's artwork here. 

Dad #12 (Right Foot), 2012 © Odette England

"As photographs became increasingly ubiquitous in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, they came to play a major role in our understanding and experience of place. Of Time and Buildings presents the work of several artists who explore the relationship between photographic images of the built environment and our experience of place".–George Eastman House.

Read more about the exhibition on the museum website here.

ODETTE ENGLAND: AMERICAN PHOTO

Thrice Upon a Time featured in American Photo

Text by Lori Fredrickson

While darkroom experimentation is largely a thing of the past, the longing to connect with a physical aspect of picture- making remains, especially for photographers working with natural subjects. Their resulting photos broaden the exploration of elemental phenomena, and engage more personal ties to land, material, and memory.

Mum #4 (Right Foot), 2012 © Odette England

For Australia-based Odette England’s project Thrice Upon a Time, working with the material of the landscape was literally tied to the land itself. England focused on the terrain of her childhood home, a 200-acre farm in the small settlement of Ponde in South Australia, by a two-step process: a 2005 journey (before conceiving the project) to capture the location on film, and a 2010 return by her parents, who re-trod the area with the processed negatives attached to the soles of their shoes.

For England, the concept of having the film “work the land” related to how her parents physically worked the land when she was a child, before the threat of financial troubles forced her family to leave in 1989. “Living on a farm not only ties you to a specific economy, but also to seasonal rhythms,” she says. “The farm has changed hands four or five times since then, and with each passing year and new owner, I can’t help but feel that the farm dies a small death.”

Ultimately, she says, photographing the farm wouldn’t have made sense without a material connection—what had been lacking in her memory was that physical relationship. “It was an urgent thing to understand this particular patch of dirt,” England says. “It was the material that made me.”

Read the full article HERE.

ODETTE ENGLAND: REVIEW FOR "OF WALKING"

Chicago Reader Blog preview for Of Walking at the MoCP

"In its early days, photography was often confined to the studio, where subjects posed stock-still for as long as it took an image to be fixed on a glass plate. When film cameras became portable and, later, handheld, the medium easily moved outdoors, keeping pace with dramatic urban growth. But documenting that change wasn't always the focus; some shooters used the form for contemplation as they wandered on foot, their work the visible transmission of their musings. The photographer became the flaneur, that traditional walker alert to all the city's paradoxes". —Andrea Gronvall

Dad #4 (Left Foot), 2012 © Odette England

"Although metropolises are key to many of this exhibit's entries, others take the viewer farther afield. In her project "Thrice Upon a Time," the Australian photographer Odette England shows the devastating impact the 1989 loss of their farm had on her family. In 2005 she returned to document her old home; in 2010 she invited her parents along, asking them to strap the large negatives of her 2005 photos under their feet as they walked the property. Scratched, punctured, and shredded, the negatives produced images that are literal records of tears in the family fabric". —Andrea Gronvall

Read the complete preview for Of Walking HERE.

ODETTE ENGLAND: AT THE MoCP

'OF WALKING' EXHIBITION, OCTOBER 18—DECEMBER 20, 2013

We are pleased to share the news of Odette England's artworks being selected by Karen Irvine (Curator and Associate Director, MoCP), for inclusion in the Museum of Contemporary Photography's upcoming exhibition, Of Walking.

"The exhibition Of Walking  will explore the concept of thinking (while walking) made concrete via the camera's lens and other means. The scholarship behind the exhibition will include the history of photography in terms of its most famous walkers: from Atget to the street photographers of the 1950s and 60s like Garry Winogrand, to performance artists like Vito Acconci, who used walking and navigating outdoor space as a foundation for their documented performances. It will also address movements in art history that have dealt directly with walking, including the concept of the "dérive," (literally: "drifting"), or the unplanned tour through an urban landscape directed entirely by the feelings evoked in the individual by their surroundings in works such as those of Sohei Nishino or Simryn Gill. It will also include artists whose work draws attention to local social and political conditions through interaction and meandering through various landscapes, such as Paulien Oltheten, Odette England, and Hamish Fulton".—MoCP

Dad #1 (Left Foot), 2012 © Odette England

The Klompching Gallery has loaned eight photographs from Odette England's  Thrice Upon A Time series, first shown at the gallery in June-July, 2012. The artist was awarded the 2012 Project Launch Award by CENTER (Santa Fe) for the same series, and from which a selection was placed into the permanent collection of the George Eastman House, Rochester. 

Information about the exhibition at MoCP can be found HERE.

View the complete series of Thrice Upon A Time HERE.

George Eastman House Acquisitions

We are delighted to announce that the George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film (Rochester, NY), has acquired three photographs (below) from the series Thrice Upon A Time, by the Australian artist Odette England.

This accomplished series of photographs earned England the CENTER Project Launch Award (2012) and was selected for the Photographic Resource Center Exposure 2012 Exhibition. Also in 2012, the series was exhibited at the Klompching Gallery (June 6–July 20), the New Mexico Museum of Art and Galerie Huit, Les Recontres d'Arles Festival.

 Dad #12 (Right Foot), 2012 ©Odette England

Home is the center-weight of Odette England's (Australian, b.1975) artistic practice, with memory and forgetting being the counterbalances. Her photographs are fragile, contemplative and temporal spaces. She works with expired film, vintage cameras, damaged negatives and alternative photo processes; exploring the volatility of identity, emphasizing the unstable nature of the past/present and the parent/child seesaw.

 Dad #4 (Left Foot), 2012 ©Odette England

"I grew up on a dairy stud farm in South Australia. Falling milk prices and rising maintenance costs forced my parents, under the threat of bankruptcy, to sell everything and leave in 1989 when I was fourteen.

Twenty-two years later, Mum and Dad performed a kind of homecoming on my behalf. Every month for one year, from December 2010, they revisited our former family farm, wearing on the soles of their shoes a set of negatives I had made at the farm in 2005, when I took photographs of places where they had made snapshots of me as a child. As my parents walked the farm, the negatives became abraded and imprinted with local dirt and debris. The negatives were then returned to me, some so damaged they had to be pieced together with tweezers.  

This series is a movement of reclamation and transcription. Since I cannot work the land with my hands, I work it through the lens, and allow it to work the lens too, in a sense, through the tread of my parents. The dominant motive for this work is my longing for an idealized vision of home, for the sake of which I remove my parents’ agency, much as I feel my own agency removed. The resulting images mythologize my holy land, an inheritance I ache for. My parents are semi-supervised ghosts; I ask them when and where to haunt. Their repetitive, ritualistic motion helps me remember, depict, and fantasize". —Odette England

Mum #14 (Right Foot), 2012 ©Odette England

The complete Thrice Upon A Time series can be viewed online here.

Photographic prints are available as follows: 

Total edition of 3 + 1AP (available in choice of two sizes)

 27.3” x 36” image on 31.3” x 40” sheet

42.5” x 56” image on 44” x 57.5” sheet

Pigment Print on Museo Portfolio Rag

Purchase enquiries should be directed to Debra Klomp Ching at the gallery.