Adam Bartos & Christopher Hewat: Yard Sale Photographs & Russian Prose

On view through July 27, 2009, concurrent with the Timothy Woodman exhibition, The Drawing Room presents a selection of color photographs by Adam Bartos from his Yard Sale series and a group of reflective brass sculptures memorializing specific passages of Russian literature by Christopher Hewat. Installed simultaneously these three artists illuminate one another’s inspirations.

In his Yard Sale series Bartos turns his lens to random arrangements of objects encountered by chance at tag sales, creating lush, ‘found’ still lifes that resonate both formally and metaphorically. Taken at close range from an elevated vantage point, Bartos concentrates on fragments of the stuff relegated to boxes in our garages, revealing their hidden aesthetic potential and anthropological readings. In one photograph, the view into a cardboard box containing a loose set of stemmed wine glasses and a single crimson goblet, evokes human fragility and the fleeting nature of life’s celebratory moments. Presented in saturated pigment prints on sheets more than three feet tall, the humble beauty of Bartos’ discarded objects becomes monumental.

Arranged on a nearby shelf, Christopher Hewat’s newest, reflective brass sculptures represent icons of Russian literature such as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Turgenev’s Hunting Sketches and Chekhov’s Short Stories. Soldered from sheets of brass, bronze and copper, this collection of treasured texts sparkles with the warm glow particular to the medium, honoring the artist’s favorite texts. In one work, striking for its formal abstract qualities, Hewat stacks the brass volumes with a nod to surrealism by reflecting the title of Gogol’s The Nose in the cover of an elaborately bound volume.

See below for full press release and selected works.