FROM THE SERIES NEW WILDERNESS

A Site Specific Installation During Dallas Art Fair
APRIL 8-12, 2015

Artist Talk
Wednesday, April 8, 4 PM

The Joule Hotel’s Comme Des Garçons PLAY
1530 Main St. Dallas, TX 75201

SOCO Gallery, in conjunction with The Joule Hotel, is pleased to present Jeff Whetstone’s photographic installation, Over Evarts Pair, from April 8 - 12, 2015. The photograph will be installed floor-to-ceiling; wrapping 180 degrees around the Joule Hotel’s Comme Des Garçons PLAY Space. The photograph was taken during an unstaged photo-shoot in Evarts, Kentucky, and is part of the New Wilderness series for which the artist won a Guggenheim Fellowship. Whetstone’s portraits are diverse and complex portrayals of masculinity and place, specifically in Southern Appalachia. Over Evarts Pair features two reclining hunters relaxing in the sunshine, and the installation was created to provide similar respite for the tired fair goer.

Printed with an innovative technique that uses archival ink on self-adhesive fabric, Over Evarts Pair is the first photographic installation of its kind. Jeff Whetstone’s 12’ x 21’ photograph, Melanoplus Swarm, uses the same application, and is currently on view at The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Jeff Whetstone (B. 1998, American)

Jeff Whetstone was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and has been photographing and writing about the relationship between humans and their environment since he received a Zoology degree from Duke University in 1990. Whetstone received his MFA in photography from Yale University in 2001, and since then his work has been exhibited internationally. In 2007, Whetstone was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for a body of photographs entitled New Wilderness. The following year he received the first Factor Prize for Southern Art. Since 2008, his work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New Yorker Magazine, Time Out New York, Village Voice, and Art News, among others. Whetstone first exhibited his video work in 2011 when his experimental narrative short, On the Use of Syrinx, premiered at the Moving Image Festival in New York. Whetstone is a 2012 recipient of a North Carolina Arts Fellowship in film and is a professor at the Art Department of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.