Casey Kaplan

MILES COOLIDGE: “DRAWBRIDGES”
EXHIBITION DATES: JANUARY 17 - FEBRUARY 15, 2003

OPENING: FRIDAY, JANUARY 17th 6 - 8 PM
GALLERY HOURS: TUESDAY – SATURDAY 10 - 6 PM


For his fifth solo show in New York, Miles Coolidge will present “Drawbridges.” This exhibition is a group of photographs of nine automotive drawbridges taken in South Florida over the past year. The bridges in these photographs are seen fully upright from the point of view of the street. Most of the background has been cropped out of the frame and they are squared up to the edges of the picture. The vertical section of bridge in front of the camera becomes nearly identical with the picture plane itself. Consequently, a new awareness of these structures emerges, as they are used graphically to make art at the same time as they rise to let pleasure craft past.

Miles Coolidge utilizes photography’s ability to simultaneously be the purest and most artificial mode of image production. The artist’s previous work includes deadpan photographs of non-spaces as in “elevators pictures” and “garages.” These new pictures continue to explore the special relationship between “quasi-architecture” and art.
Banalities become complexities in photographs that invite us to re-consider the ordinary. Miles Coolidge’s photographs connect with both the Los Angeles urban tradition of artists such as Ed Ruscha and the German archiving aesthetic of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Coolidge calls upon the urban documentary style of early works by Ed Ruscha that presented the everyday in a flat, affectless way. There is also a strong relationship to the German archiving aesthetic of the Bechers’ images of industrial architectural structures. The pictures are cropped, from life, and context.

Miles Coolidge studied at Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, Dusseldorf, Germany with Bernd and Hilla Becher. He received his MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA. The artist was born in Montreal, Canada. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Coolidge is currently participating in the “4th Austrian Triennial on Photography,” in Graz, Austria. Since his last exhibition at Casey Kaplan, the artist has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Capitain in Cologne, Germany;
ACME, Los Angeles, CA; and the Orange County Museum, Newport Beach, CA. Group exhibitions include the MCA, Chicago; Pasadena Museum of California Art, Pasadena, CA; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Nederlands Foto Instituut, Rotterdam; Netherlands; Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Pittsburgh, PA and Nikolai Contemporary Art Center, Copenhagen, Denmark. Miles Coolidge has also recently completed a commission for the Fort Lauderdale Airport in Florida.