Explore Josephine Pryde's "Valerie" Exhibition at Secession: Photography, Sculpture, and Art Production

The exhibition 'Valerie' by Josephine Pryde explores the artist's process of creating exhibitions that examine their own production conditions. It features photographs and sculptures that blend techniques from fashion photography, science, and art printing.

Josephine Pryde's exhibition "Valerie" at the Secession delves into the artist's practice of exhibiting the conditions of her own production. Her photographs and sculptures draw upon a variety of techniques and concepts from areas such as fashion photography, natural sciences, and art printing, often interacting closely with their specific environments and relationships. The exhibition engages with the challenges of asserting novelty or stagnation in art, employing the 'disfigured reference' as a critical tool. It questions what a temporary concentration of effort in an art exhibition can achieve, particularly as traditional avenues for creative distraction become increasingly obstructed. Specifically, the photo works "Relax (blue)" (2004) and "Relax (grey)" (2004), created for the Secession, depict a mass of color flying through the air and landing on a white Honda Prelude 20 Ex, with its shadow in grey. Pryde utilizes photography not just to show what the eye cannot see, but to reorient the universe within our perceptual limits. The 13-part photo series "A Moment Away from Pressure" (2004) documents the drying process of a handful of sticky yellow substance over 36 hours. Additionally, the long sculpture "Chains" (2004) is a deliberate remake of Eva Hesse's "Untitled (Rope Piece)" (1970), substituting latex-covered ropes with oily, used bicycle and motorcycle chains. This choice serves to stabilize the original work, which is likely too fragile to be exhibited again, while also subverting gendered assumptions tied to the materials. The exhibition also features solarized portraits of the artist Lucy McKenzie, echoing darkroom experiments by Lee Miller and Man Ray, serving as a cautionary tale for emerging artists about the nature of inspiration and artistic legacy.