Lois Conner

Lois Conner September 19-November 14, 2015

Photography dealer Kathy McCarver Root and her gallery, KMR Arts, proudly announce the opening of photographs by Lois Conner. The exhibition will run
from September 19 through November 14, 2015 with an opening reception on September 19 from 4-7 pm. The artist will be at the opening and will be
signing copies of her recent publication, Beijing: Contemporary and Imperial (Princeton Architectural Press, 2014).

This exhibition includes images made during Lois Conner's travels throughout the world: from the Badlands in South Dakota to Cappadocia, Turkey; from the
rooftops of New York City to the rooftops of Garden Monastery in Tibet; from the Pagan Plains in Burma to the skyscrapers of Hong Kong.  Conner痴 work
encourages the viewer to explore the similarities and nuances of our world. Though we are shown a moment in time of a specific place, her images invite us
to consider the history of that place, its culture and its connection to other places. Conner describes her process:

"What I am trying to reveal through photography in a deliberate yet subtle way is a sense of history. I would like my photographs to describe my relationship
between the tangible and the imagined, between fact and fiction. I知 a born traveler and adventurer, and an obsessive collector and observer of landscape,
attempting to twist what the camera faithfully describes into something of fiction."

Lois Conner knew she wanted to be an artist at the age of six. At nine she was photographing with a 2 ｼ camera given to her by her father.  From the age of
20, Conner worked for the UN for 13 years where she was exposed to a multitude of cultures, inspiring her to later explore those worlds. While at Yale (MFA
1981), she took an Art History class in Chinese landscape painting. It was there, studying the hand and hanging scrolls of the Ming Dynasty, that she
first began to think of the possibilities of the elongated format for her own work. In an attempt to make her work both larger and more narrative, Conner
switched to the 7x17 inch banquet camera from the 8x10 in 1982.

"The extended sweep of the panorama allows me to draw on multiple levels, much as cinema does, and to take something of the immediate present, and layer that
with something from a few centuries before. The large format camera can draw the particular in minute detail. Like adjectives in a sentence, they allow the
viewer to look closer, engaging them in the little world contained by the frame."

Conner first went to China on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1984 and has returned every year since. The stories told by her maternal grandmother, who was Cree,
have inspired Conner to explore the American West with a focus on the Native American Reservations. She has made trips west annually since 1989 and crossed
America seven times in her Ford pick-up truck, camping along the way.

In the fall of 2012 Conner痴 work was featured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the Chinese Gardens: Pavilions, Studios, Retreats exhibition. Solo
exhibitions include the recent traveling exhibition Beijing: Contemporary and Imperial at the Cleveland Art Museum in Ohio; Beijing: Unfurling the Landscape
in Canberra, Australia; Searching for Van Gogh in Dali, China (2013); Drawing the Land in Hangzhou, China (2012); and Beijing Building (2011) in London, as
well as inclusion in Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography, the first exhibition in the renovated Photography Gallery at the Museum of Modern
Art, New York (2010). Her museum collections include: the Art Institute of Chicago; National Gallery of Australia; The British Library; Brooklyn Museum
of Art; Cleveland Museum of Art; The Getty Museum; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Sackler
Gallery, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. Recent publications include: Beijing Building (Rossi & Rossi, London, 2011). Twirling the Lotus (Rossi and Rossi London, 2007), Life in a Box (Hanart Gallery, Hong
Kong, 2010), and China: The Photographs of Lois Conner (Callaway, 2000).