Casemore Kirkeby is pleased to announce the opening on Friday, November 30th, of Hey Fuckface by John Gossage, a body of work conceived in 1984 and produced in 1989. Concerning the toxicity of several pre-Superfund sites located in Staten Island and Syracuse, New York, Gossage documented the locations by driving to several points of hazardous contamination and photographing the locations as found. The exact places were decided upon by consulting the 103c list of hazardous waste sites that the EPA issued. Over the years following his initial investigation, Gossage added hand-scrolled curses to accompany each individual silver gelatin print, and craft paper remnants creating a unique collage. A truncated selection of these works, collectively known as Hey Fuckface, was last exhibited in 1990.
The selection currently on view at Casemore Kirkeby was edited by Gossage and represents his personal favorites within the body of work. John Gossage (born in New York, 1946) is an American photographer, noted for his artist's books and other publications using his photographs to explore under-recognized elements of the urban environment such as abandoned tracts of land, debris and garbage, and graffiti, and themes of surveillance, memory and the relationship between architecture and power. His first monograph, The Pond (1985), was reissued in 2010; other notable titles include Stadt Des Schwarz (1987); There and Gone (1997); Snake Eyes (2002); Berlin in the Time of the Wall (2004); and The Thirty-Two Inch Ruler/Map of Babylon (2010). His work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Sprengel Museum, Hannover, among others. Gossage lives in Washington, D.C. He is the recipient of a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship.
