To See A Darkness: New Exhibit at Front Gallery!

Alright folks, the rumors are true: I'm hanging a new exhibit at the Front Gallery this summer. The Asheville Area Arts Council has paired me up with a ceramicist and a mixed media-ist and let us loose with their trendiest downtown gallery space, heedless of the artistic consequences.

As if that weren't reckless enough, they're going to cater a big throw-down to get this exhibit started. The show opens with a reception on the evening of July 3, so that you can tell your grandkids you met me, Max Cooper, before they named that wing of the Smithsonian after me.

I love being ostentatious, but the sober truth is that this work is a deeper cut than any I've made before. It's been three long years since the first DarkTopo images appeared at the Wedge. I started 2009 in search of a grounded vision, and this show is a direct result of that search. And I want to show you what I've found. More than any work I've shown yet, this is photography as a way of bearing witness.

And it's going to be huge, and it's going to be awesome. But enough of that serious talk; I know you want the gritty details. Here they are, along with some sample images and the outrageously ostentatious press release I just wrote about myself!

What: To See A Darkness, new photography by Max Cooper. Part of a group exhibit with Cynthia Lee, Ginger Huebner, and Jane Reeves.
Where: Asheville Area Arts Council's gallery, 11 Biltmore Avenue, downtown Asheville, NC, 28801
When: Show opens July 3, with a catered reception from 5:30-8:30, and continues through August 1. Free of charge!
Gallery hours and contact info here: www.ashevillearts.com


Sample images (click for larger versions and distribute widely!) . . .







Official gallery postcards:







Ostentatious press release!

For Immediate Release
10 May, 2009

ASHEVILLE, NC-—Local photographer Max Cooper will exhibit a new body of work this summer at the Asheville Area Arts Council’s Front Gallery. Known for his haunting nighttime scenes of Appalachia, Cooper characterizes the upcoming exhibit as a new chapter in his photographic narrative.

“My work is about creating a sense of place,” says Cooper, whose last exhibit focused on Asheville’s own River Arts District. “This show will introduce the characters that inhabit that place. It’s portraiture, rendered honestly, directly, and in the same dark atmosphere I’ve shown in the past.”

Entitled To See A Darkness, the exhibit is the third in Cooper’s award-winning Dark Topography series. Cooper is a graduate of UNC-Asheville’s Art department, where he was honored with the Ryan Patrick Jones award for excellence in photography, and recently received a merit award from Black & White magazine.

The exhibit—part of a group show with mixed media artists Jane Reeves and Ginger Huebner and ceramicist Cynthia Lee—will open on July 3 with an evening reception from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m., and will remain on display through August 1. The gallery is located at 11 Biltmore Avenue in downtown Asheville.

More information is available at the Asheville Area Arts Council’s website, www.ashevillearts.com, or at Cooper’s website, www.darktopography.com. The gallery can be reached by phone at (828) 258-0710, and is open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, and noon to 5 p.m. Saturday.