Muzi Quawson: Pull Back the Shade

Yossi Milo Gallery is pleased to announce Pull Back the Shade, an exhibition of color photographs by Muzi Quawson. The exhibition will open on Thursday, February 21 and close on Saturday, March 29 with an artist's reception on Thursday, February 21 from 6:00 to 8:00 pm. This will be Ms. Quawson's first solo show in the United States.

Focusing on "outsiders", Ms. Quawson explores the various social, financial, and political structures that define American society. With photographs that possess a cinematic style, Ms. Quawson investigates the identity of Amanda Jo Williams, a young musician and mother in Woodstock, New York. After a chance meeting in Manhattan in 2002, Ms. Quawson created Pull Back the Shade over the course of the following four years while staying with Amanda in Woodstock and traveling with her around the country. By photographing Amanda's relationships with her partner and young twin daughters, Ms. Quawson's photographs comment on the frustrations of young motherhood, domesticity and social alienation.

The style of the photographs recalls the cinematography of New American Cinema of the 1970s and its aggrandizement of the anti-hero. Pull Back the Shade was first shown at the Tate Britain in London where the works were displayed as a slideshow, bringing their collective effect closer to that of a film. For this exhibition, the color negatives have been developed as Duratran prints and placed in light boxes; the result is a series of illuminated photographs that resemble stills from a color film.

Ms. Quawson completed her Masters in Fine Arts at the Royal College of Art, in London in 2006. Since then, her work has been featured at the Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Manchester; Tate Britain; and the Barbican Art Gallery, London. Muzi Quawson was born in 1978 in London, where she continues to live and work.