NEW ORLEANS, LA.- Jonathan Ferrara Gallery is pleased to announce Resounding: A Prospect 1.5 exhibition curated by Dan Cameron featuring the work of Fikret Atay (Turkey), Rhona Bitner (Paris and New York), Sean Duffy ( Los Angeles), Tim Lee (Vancouver) and Ted Riederer (New York). The exhibition opened on Saturday January 8th and runs through February 1, 2011.

"For devoted music fans, the hardest adjustment one has to make is the echoing silence that descends when the band finishes playing and the house lights go up. With the sudden absence of music, other senses rush to fill the void, with visual art foremost among the ways music becomes 'represented' when nobody is playing. As technology increasingly transforms the medium for delivering music to its audience to obsolete artifacts, we look upon the vinyl LP, the cassette, and the CD as artifacts from a parallel universe. Each of the five participating artists deals with this involuntary distance from their musical muse in a different way." - Dan Cameron

In Rhona Bitner's photographs of sites where legendary musical performances took place, one senses a residue of the historical act, much as one might when contemplating a battlefield where scores of individuals fought and died several lifetimes ago. Whether it is an image of Sun Studios in Memphis, Preservation Hall in New Orleans, or Cobo Hall in Detroit, invisible cues let us know that we are gazing upon something important. Tim Lee's photographs and videos are simple slights-of-hand that enable the artist to become one of his own musical idols by recording himself going through the physical act of playing an instrument, & then 'attaching' that image to the figure of an actual musical virtuoso.

The vinyl LP is unique in its capacity to imbue an ambience of baby boom nostalgia, which makes it a nearly universal symbol of music's unlimited expressiveness. Ted Riederer and Sean Duffy both use the vocabulary of record collecting to produce a startlingly up-to-date range of images. Duffy's ingeniously altered record players and album jackets suggest hidden meanings in the accidental & the mundane, while Riederer's constructed environment of recycled vinyl ties together the escape fantasy of Star Wars with an unabashedly romantic perspective on the intricate network of indie bands and labels throughout the country.

Fikret Atay, who is from the Kurdish region of Turkey, has often incorporated the principle of accidental or found music into his videos, by treating the impulse toward rhythm and melody as a kind of side-effect of other cultural processes. In this way, the sound of two boys warming up on a winter night in an ATM, or of men gathering for prayer, becomes a conduit for a musical impulse that is an innate part of human behavior.

Prospect 1.5
As part of its mission to present and promote the art and artists of New Orleans, U.S. Biennial will present Prospect.1.5 New Orleans, a fifteen-week program of exhibitions, symposiums, and public events taking place November, 6, 2010 through February 19, 2011. Prospect.1.5 will highlight the contemporary art scene in the city, with almost fifty artists presenting work in twelve venues throughout the New Orleans metropolitan area.

Prospect.1.5 will also serve as a preview to Prospect.2 New Orleans. Several Prospect.1.5 venues will also host exhibitions for Prospect.2, and many of the world's most promising and/or recognized local, national and international artists will be visiting New Orleans during Prospect.1.5 in advance of developing major new projects to be premiered at Prospect.2.

The Artists

Fikret Atay (Video)
(Batman, Turkey, 1976)
Lives and works in Batman and Paris
Represented by Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris

Fikret Atay was born in 1976 in Batman, Turkey, a small Kurdish city on the Tigris River close to the Iraqi border. He received his degree in fine arts from Dicle University in Diyarbakir, Turkey, and currently lives in Paris. Atay has had solo exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, León, Spain; Maison de l'Architecture, Paris; and the Vienna Kunsthalle. His video works have been included in the group exhibitions Time Zones at the Tate Modern, London, and Adaptive Behavior at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, and in several biennial exhibitions worldwide. Reviews of his work have appeared in Flash Art, Art Press, and Contemporary.

Rhona Bitner (Photography)
Lives and works in New York and Paris
Represented by CRG Gallery, New York and Galerie Xippas, Paris

Photographer Rhona Bitner has spent the past 15 years of her career observing and capturing the performer and the performance space. Though the artist documents the space, the photos are far from documentary. In her body of work titled "STAGE," Bitner captures the silent moments just before and directly after someone appears on the stage. Bitner lives and works in New York and Paris. She exhibits work in the U.S. with the CRG Gallery in New York and the Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston and Galerie Xippas in Paris. Bitner has participated widely in international exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Wadsworth Atheneum, and most recently in Les Rencontres d'Arles in France and "Women in Photography" currently at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Sean Duffy
Lives and Works in Los Angeles
Represented by Susane Vielmetter Gallery, Los Angeles

Duffy's music-based sculptures and installations ingeniously combine technology with an interest in the poetics of obsolescence. He generally works with recycled materials, not as a way of lending them the aesthetic patina of a found object, but to investigate our fraught relations with the technologies that enable us to enjoy music, and that break that bond of attachment once a new technology has been developed.
For this exhibition Duffy will present the work, Lonesome Town, whose central part is a copy of the 45rpm single by the same title, as well as a group of wall works created from altered record covers.

Tim Lee
(Korea, 1975)
Lives and works in Vancouver
Represented by Lisson Gallery, London and Rüdiger Schöttle Gallery, Munich

Lee's artistic practice is concerned with public figures from sports, art history and popular culture. Through enactments, he examines key moments in their careers and explores how they relate to a larger cultural history. Born in Seoul, he lives and works in Vancouver. He won the Sobey Art Award in 2008 and has been featured in group exhibitions at Musée des beaux-arts, Montreal; Tate Modern, London; or Mori Art Museum, Tokyo and was the Capp Street Project artist in residence at the California College of the Arts in 2007. His most recent solo exhibition took place at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2008.

Ted Riederer (Painting/Installation)
(New York, 1970)

One-time refugee from punk and sometime band member, Ted Riederer has armed himself with photography equipment, painting supplies, electric guitars, amplifiers, old LPs, record players, drum kits, hard disk recorders and long stemmed roses as he's ambled artistically from the Americas to the Antipodes.

His work has been shown nationally and internationally including exhibitions at PS1, David Zwirner Gallery, Goff and Rosenthal Berlin, Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, Jack Hanley Gallery( San Francisco), Marianne Boesky Gallery, David Winton Bell Gallery(Brown University), University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, and the Liverpool Biennial. Riederer holds a BA from Tufts University, a BFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and an MFA The School of Visual Arts

To view works in the Resounding exhibition, please click here.