 Margaret Salmon Margaret Salmon is a photographer and filmmaker whose use of black and white film, sharply cropped camera angles and graphic composition draws on modernist photography and auteur European cinema. Lying behind the abstract beauty of her imagery is a powerful emotional content. This exhibition premiers a new work created by Salmon as a result of the six month residency in Italy awarded by MaxMara and based at the American Academy in Rome and the Cittadellarte - Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella. "Ninna Nanna" shows three Italian women in different stages of early motherhood, filmed in their homes and singing the Italian lullaby that titles the piece. Each film celebrates the tenacity and grace of the three mothers and the contradictions that exist between the icon of mother and child and their lived experience. Salmon's new film is presented as a triptych, she says; "The significance of making three films... is manifold. There is the Holy Trinity... as well as the Trilogy of Loneliness of Fellini and the War Trilogy of Rossellini... I also see the importance of the number three in the very geographic and social makeup of Italy; the immense divide between North, South and Central people and economies as well as universal distinctions between upper, lower and middle class; city, country and suburb." (Margaret Salmon) The exhibition also includes two other recent works. "PS" (2002) combines beguilingly elegant footage of a man gardening and smoking against a sky lit by fireworks with the harrowing dialogue of a couple in conflict. "Peggy" (2003) is a monochromatic portrait of an elderly woman whose remarkable voice provides the moving soundtrack in this elegy to the beauty of old age. The first MaxMara Art Prize for Women was created to help nurture and promote emerging female artists based in the UK and to enable their development by providing the opportunity to produce new works of art through a six month residency in Italy. Organised by Dorothea Jaffe and curated by Bina von Stauffenberg. Supported by MaxMara Exhibition: 25 January - 11 February 2007 Gallery hours: Tues-Sun 11 am - 6 pm, Thursdays until 9 pm Whitechapel Art Gallery 80-82 Whitechapel High Street GB-London E1 7QX Telephone +44 20 7522 7878 (recorded information) Fax +44 20 7377 1685 Email info@whitechapel.org www.whitechapel.org |
 |