New Exhibits @JGS Forward Thinking Museum

The JGS Forward Thinking Museum is brimming with photography exhibits worth checking out. If you haven't visited the museum before, it is an online, immersive environment, where you "enter" the museum and use an "elevator" to visit various "floors" where exhibits are displayed. There are now over 35 floors of photography exhibits, with some floors holding a variety of shows. Every time I visit this site, it seems there are new exhibits to see or old ones worth revisiting. While we can't possibly review each and every one of the shows on display, here are a few (both new and old) that we have found of interest

• David Maisel, Oblivion: There are 8 high contrast black and white aerial views of Los Angeles in this exhibit, filled with patterns of freeways, developments, streets and intersections. There are certain reminders of Ed Ruscha in these prints, but in a much darker, moodier, almost apocalyptic way. There are also a few negative prints that are even more haunting.


• Jan Banning, Bureaucratics: This show is a series of 49 color portraits of bureaucrats from all over the world (Yemen, India, China, Bolivia etc.), sitting behind their desks. They are a fascinating kaleidoscope of odd environments, with flags, political portraits, bold paint, and other surprising accoutrements.


• JGS Theater: There are 30+ videos of various photographers on view in the "theater". While I haven't seen them all, I have enjoyed Naoya Hatakeyama's The Skin of the City, Daido Moriyama's Memories of a Dog, and Stephen Shore's American Beauty. They all incorporate the photographer talking directly about his work.


• Risaku Suzuki, Snow and Cherry Blossoms: There are 22 color images in this exhibit. The blurred images of snow against the night sky and of a clear blue sky seen through a veil of pink cherry blossoms are quiet and lovely, without being cliche.


• Martin Parr, Art World Openings: This show has 22 color images of patrons at art openings, some looking at the art, some looking at each other. Parr's wry observations are palette cleansing in a world of people taking themselves too seriously.


• Daido Moriyama, Shanghai: There are 45 black and white images of Shanghai in this exhibit. It is interesting to see Moriyama, whom we associate with uniquely Japanese subjects, taking his eye for darkness and shadows to China.

You could spend hours digging around all that is available in the museum, and there is a wide variety of photography on view, including a strong emphasis on contemporary photojournalism. It is well worth your time to pay a visit. The JGS Foundation site (with an amazing photography collection) can be found here. The Forward Thinking Museum can be reached from that site or directly, here.

By the way, if you subscribe to the feed from this blog, your reader will show an earlier post showing some random notes I inadvertently published this morning, which I have since deleted (but the first mistaken post doesn't disappear for you unfortunately). Sorry for the confusion.