Mercy, Give and Take

Casemore Gallery is pleased to present "Mercy, Give and Take", a group exhibition that explores the idea of opposition in the photographic works of John Gossage, Raymond Meeks, Awoiska van der Molen, Sean McFarland, and Aspen Mays.

The show pairs works from each of the included artists, with each pairing sharing common visual elements—buildings, landscapes, photographic tools—but in markedly juxtaposed states, whether life or death, turmoil or serenity, idyll or menace, pushing up or giving way, or even transposal of space. In doing so, the viewer has the opportunity to look beyond the idea of opposition as having two parts, and ponder all that lies between.

John Gossage (b. 1946) Staten Island, New York is an artist who has, more than most contemporary photographers, become noted for his intellectually engaging, subversive and well-crafted artist books and other publications. In them, the artist utilizes under-recognized elements of the urban environment—unused and abandoned patches of land, refuse and detritus, barbed wire, graffiti, and other disruptions—to explore themes as disparate as surveillance, memory and the relationship between architecture and power.

Gossage was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012. His photographs have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions over the past 45 years. His many one-person exhibitions have included The Better Neighborhoods of Greater Washington, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (1976); Photographs of Berlin, Cleveland Museum of Art, (1989); LAMF, Sprengel Museum, Hannover (1990); One Work in 39 Parts, The Saint Louis Museum of Art, (1994); There and Gone, Sprengel Museum, Hannover, (1998); The Romance Industry, Comune di Venezia, Venice (2003); Berlin in the Time of the Wall, Gallerie Zulauf, Freinsheim (2005); The Pond, National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC (2001); and Three Routines, Art Institute of Chicago (2014).

Aspen Mays (b. 1980) received her MFA in photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009. Solo exhibitions of her work have been mounted by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Light Work, Syracuse; and the Center for Ongoing Projects and Research, Columbus. Mays was recently included in the exhibition Anna Atkins Refracted: Contemporary Works at the New York Public Library (2019). Mays was the recipient of a 2006 Rotary Fellowship and was a 2009 Fulbright Fellow. She lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, where she is Assistant Professor at California College of the Arts.

Raymond Meeks (Ohio, 1963) has been recognized for his books and pictures centered on memory and place, the way in which a landscape can shape an individual and, in the abstract, how a place possesses you in its absence.

Raymond Meeks lives and works in the Hudson Valley (New York). He is the sixth laureate of Immersion, a French-American photography commission sponsored by Fondation d’entreprise Hermès. Exhibitions from this commission were presented in New York (ICP September, 2023) and currently in Paris (Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson September, 2024). The Inhabitants, a book made in collaboration with writer George Weld, was published in August 2023 by MACK

Awoiska van der Molen (1972) is a Dutch photographer known for her monumental black-and-white analogue images that represent her experience of the primordial and psychological space in the world she photographs.

In 2019 van der Molen was shortlisted for the Prix Pictet, the global award in photography and sustainability. In 2017 she was both shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize and the recipient of the Larry Sultan Photography Award. Van der Molens' work has been shown at Foam Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam; Huis Marseille, Amsterdam; Kousei-Inn, Kyoto; Les Rencontres d’Arles, France; Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; The Photographers’ Gallery, London; FoMu, Antwerp; and Fotomuseum, Den Haag.

Sean McFarland (b. California, 1976) creates work that explores the relationship between photography and the history and representation of landscape, particularly western landscapes and the skies above. With a focus on experimentation, the artist joins aspects of other mediums with photography to uncover the experience of seeing, the passing of time, and the knowledge that we and what we know cannot live forever.

McFarland received a MFA from California College of the Arts, Oakland (2004) and a BS from Humboldt State University, Arcata, California (2002). His solo exhibitions include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (2017); Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, New York (2015); San Francisco Camerawork, San Francisco (2009), and White Columns, New York (2004). His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA (2018); George Eastman Museum, Rochester (2016); Aperture, New York (2014-15); and Bay Area Now 6, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2011). His work is in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; George Eastman Museum; and the Milwaukee Art Museum. Francisco, and teaches at San Francisco State University.

^{Image: Raymond Meeks, Halfstory #955 Canajaharie NY 2016, 2019}