LA Photo-Conceptualist Rediscovered in Bangkok at the Rooftop Gallery

BANGKOK, April 9, 2013 /PRNewswire-iReach/ -- The Farmani Gallery presents Graham Howe: Colour Theory at the Rooftop Gallery, Bangkok. Australian-American photo-conceptualist Graham Howe's rediscovered, brightly-coloured 1980s photographs are a playfully intelligent satire squarely based in the photo-conceptual tradition of his artistic peers, John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman and William Wegman.

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130409/CG91149)

Known professionally as a leading photo-curator and founder of an independent arts organization, Curatorial Assistance, Howe for 30 years has held back his artistic works in favor of his curatorial career, and with their recent release these innovative works have been the subject of a spate of recent museum exhibitions on both the West and East coasts of the United States.

Inspired by textbooks on the theory of color photography, Howe undertook to recreate and test the veracity of the "governing principles" of the medium. His findings, though sometimes humorous and spuriously unscientific, nonetheless lead us to believe that there is often more to photo-science than meets the eye.

Howe used tri-color studio lights projecting primary colors red, blue and green to demonstrate their physical recombination into secondary the colors of yellow, magenta, cyan and white. Where his subject is a line of ducks suggesting a funfair shooting gallery, Howe is taking aim at certain edicts in the textbooks both proving and at the same time disproving their veracity; accidental folds on a restaurant tablecloth are both tromploi illusion and proof of how three-point perspective drawing principles govern what we think we see; and a naked female torso placed on a white paper surface appears to hover off the studio floor when lit by tri-color lights that "make white".

Since the late 1960s Howe has been investigating the relationship between seeing and thinking, exploring the intrinsically fictional nature of photography by probing its role in performance, ritual, and sculpture. According to curator Colin Westerbeck, "By the 1980s, Howe's playful conceptually-based satires of photo art had developed into a wide-ranging inquiry into the essential qualities of photography itself. Howe's work confronts many art historical assumptions that he not only questions but tears down with wit and humor."

Graham Howe received his Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting, Sculpture and Graphic Art, majoring in Photography, from the University of California, Los Angeles, studying with Robert Heinecken. In 2009 a 40-year retrospective exhibition of his work was curated by Colin Westerbeck and exhibited at the California Museum of Photography in Riverside and commemorated by the CMP's publication of Howe's first monograph, Sly Conspiracies, Photographs 1968-2008.

Howe's works are in many major museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

The exhibition is open March 9 though April 18, 2013.

Media Contact:

Cat Jimenez Farmani Gallery, 310-497-9847,

[email protected]

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SOURCE Farmani Gallery

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