Introducing The Goodness!

For those of you who are new to this blog, (which is everyone because this blog is new) I will be supplying the goods, also known as the “The Goodness!” from the photo world. I try to stay up on contemporary happenings within the photography realm and there are always artists and artworks from the past that re-introduce themselves. Through a new concept of secret internal networks known as the internet and lots of Umpa Lumpa’s, I will bring you The Goodness!

This time The Goodness! comes from an artist named Andy Freeberg.

Two projects titled Sentry: Gallery Desks in Chelsea and Guardians of Russian Art Museums show us a side of the gallery scene that we would normally never view.

In the Guardians series, Freeberg photographs the area around the artwork allowing the elements in a gallery space to merge with one another on the same plane. The historic artwork of the museum, the older women who guard the artwork and the surrounding details of the gallery space now begin to interact with one another. Notice how the women look like the figures painted hundreds of years ago. The modern clothes on some of the guardians match the garments worn in the past and fire extinguishers now become sculptural.

In the Sentry series the viewer is shown the initial space that we all walk by when visiting a gallery, the gallery desk. When we think of a gallery, we usually imagine a unique architectural space full of artwork. In this series, the desks and surrounding walls are stale and feel cold. The only diversity in most of the images is the top of the forehead of the person that sits behind the desk to greet us.

Both of these bodies of work do what photography does best by allowing the viewer the opportunity to notice and think about something that might otherwise be unseen.