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Press Release Checklist Bill Jacobson Songs of Sentient Beings February 15 - March 23, 1996 The Julie Saul Gallery is pleased to announce our second solo exhibition of new work by Bill Jacobson: Songs of Sentient Beings. The exhibition will consist of nine large scale black and white photographic images, all figurative, silhouetted against rich dark grounds. Unlike the pale and eerie Interim Portrait and Figure series which maintained a very consistent format, this selection of images is extremely diverse, drawing from many genres of figurative photography. For Example, one of the two 40 x 50" prints represents a back, androgynous and sensual. In the other a bent figure is shown as elongated and sculptural. Although Jacobson's work over the last five years has focused primarily on loss and desire in the gay community, this show includes a few female images. These include a proud and hieratic frontal torso and a woman in an interior reminiscent of French impressionist café scenes. The mood remains elegiac, but Jacobson is less hermetic and conformist to a model in his choice of subjects and poses. Since his last solo show with the gallery in 1994, Jacobson has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe. On March 8, 1996 a major survey show of 80 international contemporary photographers entitled Prospect 96 opened at the Frankfurt Kunstverein. Exhibition curator and museum director Peter Weiermair is reproducing a recent work by Jacobson (a portrait in profile) on the announcement and catalog cover for the exhibition. Jacobson's work has entered several major museum collections in the last two years including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The New York Public Library, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Princeton University Art Museum. In a review of the London Photographer Gallery's show in 1995, critic Simon Watney wrote in Artforum, "While documentary photography may produce instructive and often harrowing depictions of some aspects of the (Aids) epidemic…such photography cannot register the issues of forgetting explored so vocatively by Jacobson… Jacobson is that rare thing, an artist whose form perfectly conveys his subject matter; the quality of the print is entirely coterminous with the significance of the image." Vince Aletti, arts editor of The Village Voice wrote in the January issue: "Jacobson gives style content: The dense fog that suffuses his pictures of men suggests a rich emotional state… His images seem to be fading before our very eyes, as transient and unfathomable as life itself. It's a dark but strangely luminous vision, and it seems just right just now." BILL JACOBSON SONG OF SENTIENT BEINGS FEBRUARY 15 - MARCH 23, 1996 Counterclockwise from door: Song of Sentient Beings #1633, 1995 gelatin silver print 35 ½ x 28 ½" edition of 5 Song of Sentient Beings #1617, 1995 gelatin silver print 28 ½ x 35 ½" edition of 5 Song of Sentient Beings # 1676, 1995 gelatin silver print 35 ½ x 28 ½" edition of 5 Song of Sentient Beings #1530, 1995 gelatin silver print 35 ½ x 28 ½" edition of 5 Song of Sentient Beings #1612, 1995 gelatin silver print 47 ¼ x 38 ¼" edition of 3 Song of Sentient Beings #1532, 1995 gelatin silver print 35 ½ x 28 ½" edition of 5 Song of Sentient Beings #1588, 1995 gelatin silver print 29 ½ x 23 ¾" edition of 5 Song of Sentient Beings #1648, 1995 gelatin silver print 35 ½ x 28 ½" edition of 5 Song of Sentient Beings #1583, 1995 gelatin silver print 35 ½ x 28 ½" edition of 5 top For additional information contact the gallery back |
 Song of Sentient Beings #1617  Song of Sentient Beings #1530  Song of Sentient Beings #1612  Song of Sentient Beings #1588  Song of Sentient Beings #1648 |