atom | planet
ANNE ARDEN MCDONALD
November 1 - December 21, 2018
ABOUT THE PROJECT
Candela Gallery is pleased to present ATOM | PLANET, a solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist, Anne Arden McDonald. Within this series, McDonald creates photographic works imbued with celestial and atomic aesthetics. Approaching her darkroom process like a sort of alchemy, McDonald captures a dialogue nebulously drifting between mediums by testing materials and techniques through experimentation, noting variables, and observing the results, and amending processes.
Completely camera-less and without a conventional negative, McDonald layers nontraditional materials like bleach, clusters of soap bubbles, and/or hundreds of household spices and cleaners, steering the creation of these unconventional images. Each unconventional photogram is further manipulated through a series of techniques – scrubbing, evaporating or decaying – illustrating the circuitous nature of life, death, and what comes after. The resulting photographs, with a rather magnificent spherical quality, are McDonald’s manifestation of both the macro- and micro-cosmos within our universe.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Anne Arden McDonald (born 1966) is a Brooklyn based visual artist who grew up in Atlanta Georgia. From age 15 to 30 she made self portraits by building installations in abandoned interiors and performing privately for her camera in these spaces, publishing a book of this work in 2004. For 20 years, she was a private dealer for 13 Czech and Slovak photographers who do performances for the camera. She also has a large body of dreamy photographs shot with a Diana camera over several decades. More recently she has been using light and chemistry the way a painter or sculptor would to build images on photographic paper.
McDonald’s work has been exhibited widely: in the past 30 years, she has had 44 solo exhibitions in 10 countries (about 230 total shows in 14 countries) and has been published in over 215 places in 20 countries, including in Aperture, European Photography, and Eyemazing Magazines. Her work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Worchester Art Museum, the Houston MFA, the Denver At Museum, the Detroit Institute of Art and the Bibliothque Nationale in Paris. She was a Lapine Fellow at the Millay Colony, was given a grant of studio space from the Sharpe Foundation, and has been in residence at the Byrdcliffe colony from 2015-2017. She taught for 6 years at Parsons School of Design in New York, and has lectured about topics such as staged photography, self portraiture, Czech and Slovak photography, alternative photography, and her own work.
