For Immediate Release:

EXHIBITION PROGRAMMING

ANDREA MODICA AND LOIS CONNER

PEONIES AND LOTUS

December 16, 2004 – February 25, 2005
Opening Reception: Thursday, December 16 from 6:00 – 8:00 pm

The Horticultural Society of New York is pleased to present recent photographs by Andrea Modica and Lois Conner as part of its continuing program of exhibiting botanical and horticultural artworks from the classical to the contemporary. On view will be a never before exhibited, botanically inspired selection of images from each artist. Andrea Modica renders peonies at the liminal stages of life and death, hoisted for view by odd bits of tape, while Lois Conner shows new work in her continuing project of photographing lotus - creating panoramic images in the East Asian landscape dedicated to the tensile beauty of decay and abstraction.

Both Modica and Conner use similar historical methods to create these strange, beautiful, contemporary pictures – each employs a large format camera: Modica an 8x10 inch view camera and Conner an 11x17 inch panoramic banquet camera. The process is similar as well – each makes a contact print of the negative with platinum/palladium metals or pigment ink. The result is deep, lush imagery, so attractive to the eye they pull one in for a closer look, revealing world upon world of meaning. There is a hovering timelessness that encapsulates these pictures - because of their process and their subjects, one cannot quite place them in time, their very historicity is in question. These pictures must be seen to be believed.

Modica’s Peonies embody her graceful ability to translate the evanescence of life and the wistfulness death. Recognized for her simultaneously grotesque and longingly beautiful portraits and landscapes, Modica translates these voluptuous flowers into relics hearkening the fascination of the Vanitas paintings of the 17^th Century Dutch masters. Little known horticultural lore tells us that peony seeds have been swallowed whole to prevent bad dreams, and the bark of the stem is known to nourish the blood – the symbolic resonance of such wisdom informs the viewer that Modica is intrinsically attracted to these flowers for reasons that have attracted her to past and current subjects: marvelous sadness and unabashed tragic beauty.

Conner’s Lotus pictures evoke the spiritual, compositionally precise, powerful paintings of the modern era, while quietly resonating the subtle flowing grace of Chinese scroll painting. Recalling painters like Joan Miro and Pablo Picasso, Conner’s eye punctuates the pulses of the lotus’ life and death by abstracting its body and environment to create a compositional hum of unnatural, natural surfaces. The lotus offers one of the highest vibrations of any flower and has for thousands of years symbolized spiritual enlightenment. Conner channels this energy into her pictures, showing us, with her dynamic studies that this sacred plant is capable of transcendental power - an offering for each individual who comes to see this unique exhibition.

Graduates of Yale University and Guggenheim Fellows, Modica and Conner are longtime friends. Both have photographs featured in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Institute, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York among many others. Modica is represented by Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York City. There will be a comprehensive survey of her pictures from Treadwell and Fountain at the San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts from March through June 2005. She currently resides in Manitou Springs, Colorado. Conner is represented by Laurence Miller Gallery in New York City. Her works are exhibited world-wide at sites like the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Chinese Photographers Association, Canton, China, and the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia among others. She currently resides in New York City.

HSNY’s mission is to improve the quality of life in New York through its library, community outreach and education programs.

The Gallery at The Horticultural Society of New York is open Monday - Friday from 10 am - 6 pm.

For further information, please contact Jodie Vicenta Jacobson at jjacobson@hsny.org or at 212.757.0915 ext. 113.