Jan 20th 2010

Jeremy Bolen and Bobby Burg: Postcard Trouble

@ Andrew Rafacz Gallery

835 W Washington Blvd, Chicago, IL 60607

Opening Wednesday, January 20th, from 4PM - 7PM

On view through Saturday, January 30th

New photographs by Jeremy Bolen and new paintings by Bobby Burg.

As a child, Jeremy Bolen lived a fairly peripatetic lifestyle, moving from one place to another, feeling generally rootless. The only centering experience came in the form of a vacation cottage at a Northern Minnesotan resort where his family would spend the summer months. This led to the photographers latest project, investigating the loss of American Ideals and cultural deterioration as a whole by photographing resorts primarily in Upstate New York and Pennsylvania.. From the 1970s on, the Borscht Belt region was left behind for cheap flights, central air conditioning, and the all-inclusive resort and cruise experience. These photographs display not only the desperate search for idealism that the environments represented, but also the seemingly new environments these left behind spaces create as the resorts begin to mirror their surroundings.

For the last few years, Bobby Burg has been interested in the Romantic ideals of childhood and how they are filtered through the creative process as an adult. Simultaneously layered with sentimental gestures and irony, Burg’s paintings are at once playful and off-kilter. He employs figure and line and many layers of paint to create works whose meanings shift, whose surfaces may be very accessible while referencing a deeper, more complex relationship to the world.

In Postcard Trouble, both Bolen and Burg investigate the past to look to the future. Their investigation proves that although you can never go back, your memories can be made richer.

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