Work in Progress on in Progress Work, A Photographic Survey of Downtown Brooklyn, &
The Devil in the Details
May 30, 2015 through July 11, 2015


Guest Spot at THE REINSTITUTE is proud to present Work In Progress on In Progress Work, a group project exhibition by Maureen Drennan, Carl Gunhouse, Matthew Schenning, and Jason John Würm. In conjunction, Guest Spot Project Gallery will feature The Devil in the Details, a series of works by Baltimore-Based artist, Jason Hughes. Opening Saturday May 30, 2015 (7pm-10pm) the works will be on view through July 11, 2015. A discussion entitled Gentrification, Two Cities, and the Artist’s Model will examine the various roles that have been associated with artists, and will be held in conjunction with the closing on July 11, 2015, 2-4pm.

Work In Progress on In Progress Work has been documenting the changing landscape of Downtown Brooklyn over the last four years, cataloging over 1,500 images to its blog. Work In Progress on In Progress Work was started by photographer Jason John Würm, a long-time resident of Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Jason routinely photographed on his daily commute through Downtown. In 2013, in hopes of documenting the changes in the neighborhood, he proposed a collaborative project with fellow photographers Matthew Schenning, Carl Gunhouse and Maureen Drennan. The other members of this collaborative reside elsewhere in Brooklyn, no more than a few miles from Würm and Downtown. The parameters of the project are to photograph whatever struck each artist's eye, within a circumference of about a half a mile from the Fulton Mall, in the hopes that they might give collective voice to the rapid gentrification of the area.

“Bringing this exhibition to gallery walls allows for something the city does not—pause. Its impermanence speaks by its very nature to the essence of the project, and allows for introspection, education, and awareness of the impact that urban renewal has on residents both new and old. The images in this catalog now serve not only as an archive, and a record, but as still frames that allow us time to examine the complexity of each frame; each moment that are such tiny fractions of the vastness that make Brooklyn the thriving place that it is.”

-Rose Wind Jerome, Program Associate, The Center for Photography at Woodstock

“Those images — of gleaming new apartment towers, police arrests, storefronts, street characters and interesting, only-in-the-neighborhood parking situations — take a nonideological, documentary look at life around Downtown Brooklyn, which the real estate industry has been trying to rename DoBro. ‘The gentrification story is a very sensitive topic as a whole,” Mr. Würm said. “But we hope the show conveys some sense of the environment and how things are moving along.’”

-The Birth of DoBro, Photographs of a Gentrifying Downtown Brooklyn, Alan Feur /New York Times

Maureen Drennan received an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2009 and her work has been in exhibitions in North America and Australia including the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Chelsea Art Museum, Silvereye Gallery, Newspace Gallery, Centotto Gallery, and The Wild Project. Her images have been published in The New Yorker, ARTnews, California Sunday Magazine, as well as being featured in Photograph Magazine and The New York Times in 2011 and 2014. She has received honors from Aperture, Photo Review, PDN, Photographic Resource Center of Boston, Humble Arts, Artist as Citizen, and Camera Club of New York. She currently teaches at the International Center for Photography and LaGuardia Community College.

Carl Gunhouse (b.1976) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, but he spent his formative years in suburban New Jersey. Growing up, he developed a love/hate relationship with suburbia that led to the angst familiar to most suburban youth. With this unrest came the discovery of the anger and DIY ethics of hardcore punk rock. Yearning to be part of the hardcore scene, he started photographing bands, which began his love of photography.

To escape suburban New Jersey, Carl enrolled at Fordham University in New York City. While completing a BA in European History at Fordham, he discovered that photography could be something to pursue a career so he decided to simultaneously complete a BFA in Photography. After going on to earn his MA in American History from Fordham, Carl concentrated on street photography. In hopes of developing and refining his photography work, Carl completed his MFA in Photography at Yale University.

Since graduating, he has found a great deal of personal satisfaction teaching as an Adjunct at Montclair State University, Cooper Union, Marymount Manhattan College, and Nassau Community College. He has also gained some renown for his straightforward writing on photography for such web sites as Searching For the Light, Lay Flat, and American Suburb X. His photography has been shown nationally and internationally. As an artist, he has produced a body of landscape and portrait photographs by driving around the United States to expose the little visual bits of America that give voice to our shared history and experience. Carl currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Matthew Schenning is a Brooklyn based photographer originally from Baltimore, MD where he spent his youth playing in the abandoned spaces under highway overpasses. He photographs the landscape with a large format camera favoring the slow and deliberate way of working, seeking to understand his own relationship to his surroundings. Most of his work purposely avoids specific markers of place and seeks to interject a bit of humor and poetry into the imagery of the everyday. He has been included in exhibitions in the United States and Europe. His work was featured in the first edition of The Collector’s Guide to Emerging Art Photography published by the Humble Arts Foundation and most recently in the exhibition catalogue for If This Is It published by Waal-boght Press.

Born in Downey, CA to parents in the US Army, Jason John Würm spent his childhood living throughout the US and Germany. He settled in New York City in 2001 to study photography and earned his BFA in Photography from SVA. Würm utilizes a documentary style of photography to record the ephemeral around America. In his belief that photography is best understood through practice, he has amassed an extensive archive of images, predominantly made in NYC and Brooklyn. His work has been exhibited nationally and published in The New York Times and The New Yorker. In 2012, Würm founded Waal-Boght Press to promote straight photography through annual publications.

AN ONGOING PHOTOGRAPHIC SURVEY OF DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN 2010 - 2015. ©2013 Jason John Würm, Carl Gunhouse, Matthew Schenning, Maureen Drennan. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is prohibited.


http://dtwnbklyn.tumblr.com/