For Immediate Release
Exhibition: Bruce Cratsley: Twenty Years
Dates: February 15 - March 23, 1996
"A contemporary master of light and shadow." Barbra Head Millstein, Curator, Brooklyn Museum
"Pensive and intimate, the recent work of Bruce Cratsley constructs a microcosm in which reservoirs of feeling tremble beneath carefully composed, unruffled surfaces... Yet its underlying message concerns the pleasures, sensual and intellectual, that the world has to offer..." A.D. Coleman, The New York Observer, May 4, 1992.
The Yancey Richardson Gallery is pleased to announce a retrospective exhibition of photographs by Bruce Cratsley on view from February 16 through March 23, 1996. The Photographs date from 1976 through 1995 during which time Cratsley has created a highly poetic and personal body of work whose dominate theme has been the mysterious play of light and shadow.
A prolific photographer, Cratsley has never limited himself to a particular subject matter but has sought to capture alchemy achieved by light, shadow, lens and film. His images frequently has a dreamlike character in which inanimate surfaces tremble with life and emotion. "Often I photograph the unseen, things which are not there - sensations and mysteries."
Whether portraits of friends, tabletop arrangements of curious objects, mannequins in street windows, museum interiors or Gay Parade participants in drag, Cratsley's images present an enigmatic and multilayered reality. Particularly in the photographs of inanimate objects and mirrored reflections, one's perception of space and time is made ambiguous. Edward Sozanski, art critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote in his review of Cratsley's 1991 retrospective at Swarthmore College: "All photographs stop time by recording an instant, but Cratsley's go a step further - they record time stopped, and in doing so, they insist on contemplation. One can't glance at his images and move along, one must absorb them. In that sense, they become eternal."