Berlin-based artist SIMONE GILGES’ inaugural New York solo exhibition at Foxy Production incorporates a complex set of inter-relating works that is as interested in gaps in understanding, in refusals and in mystery, as it is in revelation and transparency. Combining a range of media and subject matter, Gilges has fashioned lyrical and affecting arrangements of photographs, textiles, and sculptures that explore how connections are made between disparate elements.

Gilges’ black-and-white, monochrome and full color photographs cross continents, styles, and perspectives. Portraits, landscapes, and expansive outdoor crowd scenes, shot in Europe and Africa, alternate in scale from the intimate to the panoramic. Rural markets, indoor beaches, stormy mountain lakes, and family and solo portraits are presented in moody black-and-white, a documentary-style spectrum of color, or in vivid red or green monochrome. Her subjects, perspectives, colors, and treatments sustain a powerful reflection on the photograph, its exhibition, and reception: on what it can impart; what it can hold back; and what narratives it can suggest within the context of other very different images.

A theatrical motif permeates the exhibition: translucent curtains cover some of the portraits photographically, having been superimposed on them in the darkroom; other portraits are framed behind curtained material. In both instances, these shrouds of fabric give the their subjects an eerie, spectral quality. The semantic complexity of these compositions is compounded further by photographs of curtains, and framed curtains, with and without glass, that have been produced from plain and patterned textiles sourced from Africa, Asia and Europe. Inflecting the work with drama, suspense, provocation and irony, these fabrics hide as much as they reveal: playfully questioning the documentary photograph’s claims to truth and transparency, they open the stage to the spectator’s imaginings.

Gilges’ intricate images and materials are offset by clay sculptures in biomorphic, pod-like shapes. Resembling ancient pottery, some are unadorned and unglazed, while others are colored and highly glazed. Placed on pedestals of varying sizes, together, they give the impression of a cityscape in miniature or a series of incubators. Their placement and their primal, handcrafted styling suggest a universalism that traverses time and place, while their distinctions from one another and from the other works in the space suggest a narrative on difference: like cinematic montage, the exhibition’s juxtaposed images and objects are integrated into a dynamic series that highlights how important disjunctures and mystery are to any order of things.

SIMONE GILGES (Bonn, Germany, 1973) lives and works in Berlin. She studied visual communication at Universität der Künste Berlin and photography at the Fachhochschule Dortmund. Gilges is a founding member of Honey-Suckle Company (HSC), Berlin. She is the founder of the Publishing House and project space Neue Dokumente, Berlin. Gilges is the publisher of “freier: the magazine for mental states.” Recent exhibitions include: pret a pARTager, Dakar, Senegal; Foxy Production, New York; Badischer Kunstverein (all 2009); Galerie Giti Nourbakhsch, Berlin (solo); and Studio Voltaire, London (both 2008).