LIQUID


new work by Dornith Doherty

1 june d 7 july 2001



LIQUID, new work by Dornith Doherty, featuring color photographs and video 
work, opens June 1 from 6-8:30 P.M. at James Gallery. ?The exhibition is 
accompanied by a color brochure with an essay by Susie Kalil. ?James Gallery 
is located in Houston?s Museum District between West Alabama and Richmond 
Avenue, east of Montrose Boulevard. ?Gallery hours are Wednesday-Saturday 10 
A.M. to 5:30 P.M.


". . . The tableaux Doherty creates for the camera can evoke the odd 
curiosities assembled by 19th century scientific explorers. ?But Doherty?s 
reconfigurations, her re-filling of the skins of things, are nothing less 
than acts of reincarnation. ?As master of her fabricated world, Doherty 
breathes new existence into the most ordinary materials and detritus. ?By 
focusing on the tension between chaos and order, perception and illusion, 
Doherty folds systems of understanding back on themselves to confound 
seemingly distinct categories. ?Her photographs investigate the world rather 
than represent it, reminding us of seasonal change and the transience of 
existence. ?They engender something akin to sensory whiplash. ?We come up 
close and peer at the large-scale images - searching, scrutinizing, scanning 
- much the way she must have done while setting her sights through the view 
camera?s ground glass. ?They bring the viewer?s eye up short with shadowy 
projections that belie illusion. ?It?s not a violent phenomenon, but a 
captivating one, a persistent reckoning of the friction between form and 
void, solid and phantasm.

In photography, however, paradox is paramount, the lie is taken for truth, 
and the real is understood only in terms of its simulation. ?Accordingly, 
Doherty?s images attend to the lonely but pleasurable activity of looking. 
They concentrate on the duration of vision - time, the memory of time, the 
specific lunar radiance of dreams. She reminds us that those things touch off 
in us a deeper desire; it?s as if she peels off layers of the apparent 
richness of ourselves, arguing us back to the realm of great, raw, objectless 
longing . . ."

.from Liquid
an essay by Susie Kalil


Dornith Doherty (a native Houstonian) studied Spanish and French language and 
literature at Rice University (BA, 1980), and photography at Yale University 
(MFA, 1988). ?She received a William J. Fulbright-Garc?a Robles 
Lecture/Research Fellowship (Mexico, 1995), and a Society for Contemporary 
Photography Fellowship (1993). ?Her many solo exhibitions include Dornith 
Doherty, McDonough Museum of Art, Youngstown State University, (2000); 
Dornith Doherty, University Gallery, Texas A&M University (2001); Dornith 
Doherty: Fragmentary Evolutions (FotoFest '98), James Gallery (1998), and 
Dornith Doherty, Traces, University of Notre Dame Photography Gallery (1997). 
?Group exhibitions include FotoFest 2000: 10 x 2 + 2: 22 Texas Artists, 
DiverseWorks (2000); The Shelf-Life of Objects: Contemporary Still Life 
Photography, University of Texas at Dallas (2000); Dornith Doherty & Sybil 
Miller, Rhode Island College (1999); Flora and Fauna, Museum of Fine Arts, 
Houston (1999), and Material World, James Gallery (1999). ?Upcoming 
exhibitions include a solo at the University of Notre Dame's Isis Gallery 
(January 2002) and Aspects of Human Agency in the Landscape (with Sally 
Packard and Gary Retherford) at the Arlington Museum of Art, TX (April 2002). 
?Doherty's work can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of 
Fine Arts, Houston; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; the Museum of Fine 
Arts, Milwaukee; the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont, and the Sheldon 
Swope Art Museum, Terre Haute, among numerous other public and private 
collections nationally. ?Doherty is currently an Associate Professor of Art 
at the University of North Texas.



james gallery

307 sul ross | houston 77006 | 713.942.7035


http://www.jamesgalleryhouston.com





 - Liquid @ James Gallery