Loungers
Noac, 1995, Digital C-Type Print, Signed & Numbered Verso
I am exhausted, spent and still unfinished with my final projects for the School year but I have to go to this for a bit tonight. I'm looking forward to seeing the final images in printed form. So far, I have only viewed Greiner's work on his website and his blog.
FALLEN PARADISE — William Greiner
May 1 — June 27
OPENING RECEPTION: May 1, 6pm — 8pm
This is the underbelly of pre-Katrina New Orleans. Greiner presents an image of a city that was already devastated, by neglect and abandonment, long before natural disaster struck. His imaging of New Orleans' urban vernacular is perceptively pictured through a carefully constructed use of color, form and content.
William Greiner's modus operandi is the American Color Tradition — the snapshot that isn't. Here, the familiar becomes unfamiliar. The seemingly objective actuality of the city, its banality, its ordinary everyday impression, is transformed into a vista of flush saturated palettes of color. Born, raised and (until Katrina) living and working in the city, New Orleans has always been an importnt source of inspiration for Greiner's work.
Here, a decade of looking and picturing his immediate environment, is brought together and displayed for the first time. Fallen Paradise is a celebration of apparent incidental imagery that is, of course, abound in formal devices — frame, vantage point, shape and line. Although there exists an autobiographical subtext, Greiner is most successful in compelling us to also look, not just at his city, but at the photograph itself. Whilst the importance of his subject does not disappear, these images function as photographic artifact — at once, they are observation and cultural object.
William Geiner lives and works in Baton Roughe, Louisiana.