JACK MONTGOMERY AND RALPH GIBSON: APPEARANCES
A Collaboration with the Bates College Museum of Art
A year or so ago in a conversation I was having with Dan Mills, Director of the Bates College Museum, he mentioned that the museum had quite a number of Ralph Gibson photographs donated in recent years, perhaps a few hundred. Instantly, I said that I wanted to come take a look. Around the same time I met with a local photographer, Jack Montgomery and was trying to arrange a studio visit to view his work. After studying Gibson's and Montgomery's work, I found myself ruminating on the similarities in some of their content. These artists are trying to get at an underlying truth about how the external communicates the internal. Symbols, fashion, fetish, gender, sexuality, personal power, costume, pop symbols and coming of age all enter into play. How do we want to be perceived by the other? How will we display ourselves to manifest our identities? I chose works from different portfolios and decades by both artists to illustrate their similarities, and included outliers that I just couldn't part with. The result, I hope depicts the intersection of two late career masters, and the breadth of what they can do on the topic of Appearances or persona.
– Director, Denise Froehlich
Works by Ralph Gibson
Works by Jack Montgomery
“You are the art”
In these photographs I have not set out to make art, but rather to observe it. Each of the subjects in these images is in the process of remaking the most important art object of their lives — themselves. They are each, to varying degrees, mindful of how they will manifest their concept of self into an expression to share with the world. Thus, each image represents a performance in costume designed to communicate to the viewer (and to reinforce themselves) the physical manifestation of the person beneath the skin and clothing. Whether it is my granddaughter Rosemary spreading her owlet wings or the leather clad sailor boy or Zeraph wearing chain mail gloves, we are seeing them in the midst of creation of a persona. As with all art, it is our task to observe, ponder and seek to appreciate the meaning of the art before us; and to do so in a spirit of respect and appreciation, for all art is a gift from greater to observer.
I often say to my subjects, “I am your mirror”. These are the reflections I see.
– Jack Montgomery
“ We are all born naked the rest is drag.” – RuPaul