Bruce Wrighton. Saint George and the Dragon

About

Working with an 8 x 10” camera, Wrighton captured unexpected juxtapositions of the secular and the religious, often with an ethereal light. As he stated, “I essentially went into a lot of churches…and found icons or images that were by design a way to focus, a way to draw…a certain feeling or sense of devotion…And I found a very similar feeling around town in rooms, very old barrooms."

“I’m neither trying to give a bad name to churches and a good name to bars, or vice a versa.  I’m more interested in pointing out a certain equilibrium…the underlying sense of what goes on when people use images…to lure parts of the unconscious into the conscious so we can begin to work with them.”  Wrighton discovered some of his most poignant pictures in church basements, where the sacred and the profane humbly coexisted. The exhibition features 25 hand-made vintage color prints from 1986, as well as a handful of recent enlargements printed from his original negatives.

In her introduction to his 2010 monograph, BRUCE WRIGHTON AT HOME, the critic Vicki Goldberg wrote “Wrighton meets this world head on, shakes its hand respectfully and warmly, and all the while takes note of its inadvertent aesthetic achievements.”