Exhibition Dates: December 7 – December 28, 2013
Opening Reception: Saturday, December 7 from 6–8 pm
Gallery Location: 434 Julia Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 10 am–5 pm
Contact Info: 504.522.1999; www.arthurrogergallery.com
The Arthur Roger Gallery is pleased to present Threadbare, an exhibition of photography by David Halliday. The exhibition will be on view at Arthur Roger@434, located at 434 Julia Street, from December 7 – December 28, 2013. The gallery will host an opening reception with the artist in attendance, Saturday, December 7 from 6-8 pm.
United States, 2013. Archival pigment prints (Edition of 3), Dimensions variable.
David Halliday’s photographic series, Threadbare, profoundly builds on his previous work, at once announcing the photographer’s maturity as an artist. Provocative iconography of lost Americana – heavily decayed objects whose original intention has been exhausted – is given a new sort of vitality as his subject matter. The series began with a discarded map, used as a dartboard, that Halliday found stapled (by a prior occupant) to the wall of his upstairs bedroom. It has become the anchor, of sorts, for the group of images presented in the exhibit.
“I carefully took the frayed and faded map off the wall, piece by piece, and for the last ten years or so have kept it stored in a ziploc bag. This year, it was time to pull it back out again. I had the individual parts scanned, visualizing it as seen in the gallery, fragmented, but whole nevertheless. The condition of the map, of America, seemed timely. The rest of the puzzle came together quickly thereafter – the giant ‘squid’ rope, an old pirogue boat, the barnacled life preserver and weathered signs – all old objects figuratively extracted from the geography of this tattered map.”
Halliday’s images, spun out of the artist’s emotional response to a fading America, can feel political, ecological, and very personal. Through collage, he has re-scaled the objects to fit within his visual framework, informing the viewer of a new context for their inanimate life. Halliday’s haunting work communicates a timeless narrative; lost, found and ultimately uncertain of what lies next. Simply threadbare.
David Halliday has been photographing for nearly two decades. Born in Glen Cove, New York in 1958, he attended Syracuse University and pursued further studies under the tutelage of Arnold Newman. He has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe. In 2002, the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans exhibited a retrospective of his work and recently he exhibited at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans. Halliday’s work is included in numerous public and private collections including the New Orleans Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the New Britain Museum of Art.