Image | Melanie Pullen "Phones", 2005 (Courtesy of Ace Gallery)

Modern democratic society has made fashion into a sort of cross-subsidizing organism, destined to establish an automatic equilibrium between the demand for singularity and the right for all to have it.

- Roland Barthes in Dandyism and Fashion

February 9th - March 13th, 2010 | Opening Reception - Wednesday, February 10th, 6pm - 8pm

This exhibition is based on examining the intersection of contemporary staged or constructed photography and the relationship with strategies and theories of traditional fashion photography. Fashion photography has a long, rich history of creating fictitious imagery with luxuriously decadent and extravagantly ephemeral interpretations of modern culture. The current wave of constructed narrative photography also has a cultural tradition that seems to weave in and out of history, from investigations into Victorian modes of identity and class systems, into mysterious cinematic interpretations of recoding society and civilization. What role does photography play in interpreting contemporary narrative traditions in its impulsive and often superficial tendencies to encode, subvert, disguise and embellish how popular culture functions?

Artists Involved
Melanie Pullen (Los Angles, courtesy of Ace Gallery)
Holly Andres (Portland, courtesy of Robert Mann Gallery)
New Catalogue (Chicago, courtesy of Rhona Hoffman Gallery)
Daniel Hoyt (Portland)
Alex Lim (San Francisco)
Darien Revel (Richland, Washington)

I would like to thank Cris Moss the director and curator of Linfield College Gallery for generously inviting me to curate this exhibition. Thanks to Ace Gallery in Los Angles, Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago, and to the fantastic visions of the artists involved with this project.

Todd Johnson
Independent Curator

Todd Johnson is an artist, curator and educator based in Portland, Oregon. He was the director of Floyd Watkins Gallery (1999-2000), a small alternative arts space in Portland. He has since worked as an independent curator for Blue Velvet (2009) at MP5 in Portland, Wild Wild West (2008) at Gallery Homeland in Portland, Domesticity: Deconstructing an American Pluralism (2001) at The Waiting Room in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Popsickle (2001) at 4X Gallery in Portland.

The exhibition runs from February 9th through March 13th, 2010.
A reception for the artists will be held on Wednesday, February 10th, from 6pm to 8pm.

The public centerpiece of the Linfield College Art and Visual Culture Department is the Linfield Gallery and Linfield Studio Gallery. Throughout the academic year exhibitions of regional, national, and international stature are on view in this 1500 square foot show space. The curatorial mission of the Linfield Art Gallery reflects the fact that it is an exhibition space located in a teaching institution. Patrons can expect shows which are challenging and which exemplify the diverse approaches to the practice of contemporary visual art. The Linfield Studio Gallery serves as and extension of the main gallery. This is a smaller space for guest artists and student work.

The gallery is open Tuesday - Saturday from 12pm to 5pm when school is in session and by appointment. 503-883-2804

Directions: To reach the gallery from 99W, turn east on Keck Drive at the McMinnville Market Center in south McMinnville. Turn right at the first street onto Library Court. The art gallery is located in the second building on the left, Building B. Parking is available on the street and in the lot west of Nicholson Library. For a campus map, go to. (Miller Fine Arts Center is number 56.)"

Cris Moss
Director | Linfield Gallery