Dashwood Books signing for pp. by Peter Coffin

pp. is common book parlance for "pages" and the name of Peter Coffin's solo exhibition at half gallery. The project was conceived in 2002/2003 and some images from this series of pictures initially debuted at Andrew Kreps Gallery a year later. The photographs foster an engagement inspired by freed associations in contrast to the tradition of conceptual photography, which tends to establish prescribed interpretations and fixed meanings. Here photographs of prismatic light, geometric diagrams, Goethe's color theory charts, travel porn, and tropical drinks are documented-shot from a copy stand and reproduced at 1:1 scale-but sourced without the fuss of expressivity from the act of reproduction itself. Nothing is clearly told or concealed in Coffin's images, no particular things are demonstrated. However; in recognizing the work's designed ambiguity, we are prompted to look afresh at the world. Unlike the Pictures Generation that actively critiqued the burgeoning mass media of 60s and 70s American culture, Coffin's absence of assertion a few decades later - and again now in the context of an information-saturated culture of Big Data - gives it an anachronistic quality less prevalent in earlier examples of re-photography. It turns it into a posture of genuine inquiry.

Dashwood Books invite you to a book signing for:

pp.

by Peter Coffin

Tuesday April 29th

6 - 8pm

published by half gallery

text by Abraham Orden

hardcover

114 pages / 7 x 9 in

price $45