Opening on Thursday, October 5th

OPENING RECEPTION WITH THE ARTIST: THURSDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2023 5:30-7:30 PM

Weinstein Hammons Gallery is pleased to present Funispace, an exhibition of eleven new black-and-white photographs by Justin Newhall.  The show will be on view beginning Thursday, October 5, 2023.  This will be the artist’s first solo show with the gallery.    

Newhall is interested in the notion of place and the human narratives that underlie landscape.  These new images are from four winters spent in the Swiss Alps where he limited himself to shooting from the confines of ski gondolas.  The exhibition’s title – Funispace – comes from the name of a gondola in the resort town of Verbier, which, if pronounced incorrectly by an English speaker, hints at the strange world presented. 

 In an essay written to accompany the exposition, Irish author Padraig Rooney writes of the “no-spaces” that exist in Switzerland – an “otherworld where the picturesque enters the weird zone” – and the artists and writers that have been drawn to them for generations.  Here, “snow has right of way and you are merely passing through its dominion, encased in glass, plexiglass, a cabin adorned with the stickers and frail trophies of those who abseiled here before.  Whatever lens you have is blurred as old isinglass, encroached on by flakes of snow, struts, gantries, framing a dense forest of man-made machinery.”         

 The exhibition loosely follows the experience of ascending from mountain base to summit.  From stereo-vision trees to perspective-bending snowscapes by way of brutalist infrastructure and ads for luxury goods, Newhall’s photographs encapsulate the Swiss Alps and the people who pass through them.          

 Newhall’s work has been exhibited widely, including at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), and the Royal Academy of Arts (London).  He is the recipient of artist fellowships from the McKnight Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, and Jerome Foundation, and his work is represented in numerous public and private collections.