Jackson Fine Art is pleased to kick off our spring season in Atlanta with two solo exhibitions of new photographs by Mona Kuhn and Matthew Pillsbury, both celebrated contemporary artists distinguished by their ability to capture the human form suspended in time and space. In Private, Mona Kuhn, renowned for her frank and immediate nude portraits, turns her attention to minutiae in the heart of the American Desert in both Mojave and Arizona, treating organic material with a new sense of isolation and the same intimacy that has characterized her portraiture. Matthew Pillsbury specializes in black and white large format, long-exposure photography made using only available light. Fascinated by the act of viewing, Pillsbury continues his exploration of voyeurism but for the first time in color, represented in a series of new work that juxtaposes technology, classical architecture and museum interiors with the modern tourist as found in Toyko, New York, and Italy. On Saturday, March 21, at 11am, Mona Kuhn and Matthew Pillsbury will both give intimate talks about their work and process at Jackson Fine Art, followed by questions and refreshments. Limited space. On the evening of the 21st, from 6-8 pm, we’ll hold our traditional gallery opening reception for both artists to celebrate these exciting new bodies of work.

For Matthew Pillsbury’s previous series, Screen Lives, the artist photographed people in traditional black and white photographs watching television, using their iphones or working at computers, his time-lapse process lending his subjects a ghostly temporality. In these new photographs taken in Tokyo, Paris, and in fine art museums in the U.S., Matthew decides to capture tourists and natives alike in color while in the act of viewing—viewing cherry blossoms, classical paintings, each other. The motion captured by his time exposures puts a magical focus on the separate elements of the image — the people and their surroundings. Matthew comments on his new use of color for this series as opposed to only black and white: "Many of my images have many competing light sources in them but they can be merged into a single visual space. I thought that in color there would be more discord—the different lights in the images would be competing against each other. In Toyko and museums I visited I felt that a location like the Cup Noodle museum needed to be in color. I also felt that way about the cherry blossoms in the Hanami series, the robot show and many other locations. Before I knew it more than half the places I photographed were in color, so there was no turning back." —Matthew Pillsbury