For Immediate Release

JOE PFLIEGER Primary Structures

March 15 – April 21, 2012 Opening reception: Thursday, March 15, 6-8 PM

For his second solo exhibition at Monya Rowe Gallery, Joe Pflieger continues working from images of institutional importance and hierarchy. In this instance, he evokes an American sense of ambition and monumentality. His photographs come from objects associated with the early years of the space program, oblique angles of the first glass and steel skyscrapers, to the dark corners of the Lincoln memorial.

As with Pflieger’s previous works, these photographs only indirectly and fleetingly evoke their subject, often telling us more about our expectations than about the images themselves.

The vantage points Pflieger uses typically place the viewer in a contradictory relationship to the monumental presence the images might otherwise invoke. The photographs also embrace a contingent relationship with the physical space surrounding them, bringing the forms into the present-tense. The reflective surfaces that surround and support the images create a hazy reflection of the viewer’s body and the surrounding space, where the accidental, the local and the dematerialized come to bear on these historic and the seemingly permanent monuments.

Pflieger creates a formal barrier between the physical photographic object and the distant historical and museological sites beneath their surface.

- Philip Vanderhyden, 2012

Joe Pflieger received a MFA in Art Theory and Practice from Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois and a BFA in Painting and Printmaking from University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin. His work has recently been exhibited at The Green Gallery, Milwaukee, WI; Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago, IL; and Monya Rowe Gallery. Pflieger lives in Hoboken, New Jersey and works in New York, New York.

Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday 11 – 6 PM

Upcoming: Larissa Bates: April 28 – June 16, Two-person exhibition with Jacolby Satterwhite and Devin Troy Strother: June 22 – July 28