Bill Jacobson

"Regards"

Photographs 2007 - 2016

5 October - 30 November 2019

Hiram Butler Gallery is pleased to present Regards, a solo show by New York based artist Bill Jacobson. The exhibition is an overview of four bodies of work created between 2007 and 2016. Together, the photographs underscore Jacobson’s ongoing concerns with the very human acts of perception and observation. This will be Jacobson’s first solo exhibition in Houston since his mid-career survey at the Blaffer Art Museum in 2000.

For Some Planes (2007-2008), Jacobson traveled to four desert locations in the American west. His concern was not with landscape per se, but rather with the geometry created by the 4x5 camera proportion bisected by a central horizon line. Also included will be five images from Place (Series). These still life photographs from 2009-2013 focus on the rectangle as central subject, and suggest our constant looking at objects. There will be six images from 945 Madison Avenue, a survey of the empty building at that address made after the Whitney Museum’s departure and prior to the arrival of its new tenant, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The most recent photographs are from figure, ground, in which sharply delineated figures face away from the camera and towards defocused, nature-based backgrounds.

Bill Jacobson (b.1955, Norwich, CT) has been making photographs for over forty years. Though his methods have varied considerably, the work is joined by underlying concerns with memory, perception, and the subtle dialogue between absence and presence. Prior to moving to New York in 1982, he received a BA from Brown University (1977) and an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute (1981). He has exhibited widely in the US and Europe, and is in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum; Whitney Museum; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Brooklyn Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Victoria and Albert Museum, and many others.

Jacobson received fellowships from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2017), the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (2012), the Aaron Siskind Foundation (1995), and the New York Foundation for the Arts (1994). He has had seven residencies at MacDowell Colony and also attended Yaddo, Civitella Rainieri Foundation, Bogliasco Foundation, Blue Mountain Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Edward Albee Foundation. Six monographs have been published of Jacobson’s work.

An online catalog with a text by Jill Casid will accompany the exhibition.

CATALOGS