Bruce Silverstein is pleased to present 10 Years: A Slideshow by the installation artist and photographer Zoe Strauss. This slideshow marks the culmination of Strauss’ I-95 project, a ten year long endeavor for which Strauss displayed her photographs by affixing them to the pilasters supporting the overpass of Interstate-95 in South Philadelphia. The slideshow featured at the gallery is the artist’s final selection of the images she created for this project over the last decade.

For a single day each May (from 2001-2010), Strauss revitalized and transformed a derelict and unused public space into a site for art, facilitating community and social interaction through her installation. At the end of the exhibit, the laminated installation photographs were free for the taking. As an artist, Strauss prioritizes accessibility and she enthusiastically promotes discourse regarding her work and artistic process via her well-known and widely followed blog. She describes her work as an effort to create an “epic narrative that reflects the beauty and struggle of everyday life.” While her chosen subjects and scenes of the American urban landscape can seem unflattering, troubling or blighted, they reflect the artist’s interest in confronting and depicting life in America—not in a manner of pure social journalism, but as a method of exploring her interests in visual abstraction as well as employing the camera as a self-reflexive tool. The viewer is challenged to question his or her response to Strauss’ depiction of our cultural climate via the signs, streets, storefronts and portraits that comprise it.

Zoe Strauss (b.1970) is self-taught. She has been represented by the Bruce Silverstein Gallery since 2007. Her work was exhibited in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, the Wexner Center for the Arts, The Art Institute of Chicago, and recently in a solo mid-career retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2012. She is a recipient of a Pew Fellowship, a USA Gund Fellowship, and a Seedling Award in photography from the Leeway Foundation. She founded the Philadelphia Public Art Project in 1995 with the objective of exhibiting art in nontraditional venues. She has produced two books, America and 10 Years.

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