Winston Wächter Fine Art | Mockumentaries

June 20 - September 22, 2007

For Mockumentaries, Winston Wächter Fine Art brings together four artists to explore a cultural obsession with the documentation of reality, from the sensational to the mundane. Something in their subject matter and presentation will be recognizable to a public bombarded with reality TV and photojournalistic imagery, but with one major difference: these four artists create the worlds they profess to passively document. Though these worlds and the characters who inhabit them are on the surface entirely believable, there remains a distinct whiff of artifice.

The sculptor Robert Taplin takes a familiar fictional character, Punch, and inserts him into a variety of thoroughly modern circumstances--flashing back to his childhood, cataloguing his adult adventures--so that one can imagine a rich and complex inner life for this character. These sculptures, cast in white urethene resin, have an ethereal quality that is in tension with the alternately common, touching and crude circumstances in which Punch finds himself.

The artist who is most fully committed to fleshing out the characters in his imagined world is draftsman and filmmaker Ethan Murrow. He documents the exploits of a group of scientists and explorers, delving into their professional lives and psyches. Their tools, foibles, egos, successes and failures are meticulously hashed out in film and on paper. Murrow's large scale drawings are linked to the DVDs that he produces, in which his narratives are staged and performed, and which subsequently serve as the basis for his intricate drawings.

In some of his recent work, Gregory Crewdson has created photographs that have all the elaborate production value of a film, but with only a single still image to stand for the narrative. He orchestrates a vast crew of stage designers, lighting specialists and actors, and mobilizes whole towns to produce his photographs. Their scale is unprecedented, and the resulting imagery provides the viewer with a rich jumping off point to fill in the missing narrative.

Finally, Robert ParkeHarrison's photographs are the similarly the end product of a multimedia extravaganza involving performance, the making of props, sculpture, painting and photography, in addition to a complex print-making process. His reality is the most obviously imaginary. His central character, a role in which he, like Murrow, casts himself, utilizes imagined tools and techniques to cope with a world that has been nearly destroyed. The images have a haunting quality that supports his vision.

For further information, please contact Amanda Snyder at 212-327-2526.